MW Analyst brushes aside 'DOGE' jitters surrounding Iron Mountain's stock

By Steve Gelsi

JPMorgan reiterates overweight rating and places information-management stock on positive-catalyst watch after Iron Mountain hikes its dividend

Iron Mountain's stock has fallen 10% in the past week after one of the document-handling company's storage facilities was mentioned by Elon Musk as a purported example of government inefficiency.

JPMorgan analyst Andrew Steinerman on Tuesday reiterated an overweight rating on Iron Mountain $(IRM)$ and placed the stock on positive-catalyst watch.

While he did cut his price target on the stock to $112 a share from $125 a share, Steinerman said jitters are overblown after Musk's mention last week at the White House of the storage facility during an update on the the work of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or "DOGE."

Musk mentioned an underground Iron Mountain data-storage mine facility in Boyers, Pa., when talking about the slow pace of government bureaucracy. Musk said the speed of the elevators in the mine mostly determines the pace of processing federal employee retirement paperwork.

That was followed on Thursday by comments from Iron Mountain Chief Executive William Meaney, who said DOGE's work is an overall positive for the company's growth.

Iron Mountain offers cost-saving process automation and document digitization, as well as data-center updates, for government customers, he said. "We have been growing in both of these areas with the government over the last few years," Meaney said. "As the government continues to drive to be more efficient, we see this as a continued opportunity for the company."

JPMorgan analyst Steinerman said the fact that Iron Mountain raised its dividend shows the company's confidence in its business, including under the second presidential administration of Donald Trump, which has claimed wide-ranging rights through DOGE to government and taxpayer data.

Critics have said Musk and his team are misinterpreting much of what they claim to be discovering.

"In our view, the DOGE/Musk overhand should prove short-lived," Steinerman said. "DOGE is moving at a fast pace, and Iron Mountain's work has been a positive for reducing accumulated paper backlogs, by our assessment."

Instead, Wall Street may instead start to focus on the company's dividend boost, which JPMorgan's Steinerman said came sooner than anticipated.

Iron Mountain last week said it would increase its quarterly dividend to 78.5 cents a share from 71.5 cents for shareholders of record on March 17.

Iron Mountain's stock rose 0.6% in premarket trading on Tuesday. As of Friday's close, the stock has fallen 9.2% in 2025, compared with a 4% gain by the benchmark S&P 500 SPX .

-Steve Gelsi

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February 18, 2025 09:31 ET (14:31 GMT)

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