Couple of broker notes from today for those interested...Citi...

Couple of broker notes from today for those interested...

Citi sees mixed trends from Appen's two largest customers in January. The investment bank says traffic to Facebook's rating website slowed materially, which suggests a weak start to the year at the data annotation firm's largest customer. It says this could be a function of a change in product focus at platform owner Meta Inc., but is cautious about extrapolating trends from Facebook's rating websites. It notes that January is seasonally a quieter month for Appen. Trends at Google are stronger, with traffic to its rating site up 54% on year. Citi has a buy rating and A$14.25 target price on Appen stock, which is up 2.0% at A$8.415.

Appen's revenue visibility remains challenging but it's not clear that there will be a direct revenue impact from Facebook's weaker performance, Jefferies says. Appen shares dropped about 20% after 4Q results from Meta Inc., which is Appen's largest customer. Meta says it is rebuilding its Facebook ad optimization tech to reduce its reliance on personalized data. Jefferies thinks that being able to test aggregate and anonymized data through Appen's crowd-sourced annotators could actually be useful to Meta. The investment bank has a buy rating and A$15.00 target price on the stock, which is up 3.4% at A$8.53.