Key Takeaways
- Albemarle shares closed at $102.75 on Oct. 7, 52% below their April 16 closing high of $215.62.
- On Oct. 6, BMO Capital cut its price target to $175 from $200 and kept its Outperform rating, a target 70% above the Oct. 7 close.
- Management guided third-quarter Energy Storage sales and adjusted EBITDA lower on lower volumes and pricing, and over the last 90 days the 2027 consensus EPS fell to $11.00 from $12.98.
- BMO’s target implies a forward P/E of 18.5x against 10.9x today, which makes the call plausible but stretched ahead of the Nov. 4 earnings report.
Albemarle (ALB) closed at $102.75 on Oct. 7, 52% below its April 16 closing high of $215.62.
BMO Capital still sees 70% upside, even after trimming its own target this week.
Lithium came back down
Albemarle’s second quarter was strong: net sales rose 31% to $1.7 billion, and adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $858 million on higher lithium prices.
But on the Aug. 6 call, CFO Neal Sheorey said Energy Storage’s third-quarter net sales and adjusted EBITDA “are expected to decrease sequentially due to lower sales volumes and assuming that pricing is lower sequentially for the quarter as it stands today.”
CEO Kent Masters put the lithium price more bluntly: “it was up, it has come back.”
Volumes are a drag, too. After the June 9 fire at Talison’s CGP3 plant, Albemarle expects 225 to 235 kilotons of Energy Storage sales in 2026.
By Sept. 30, the stock was at $105.78.
BMO trimmed its target and kept its rating
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, BMO Capital analyst Joel Jackson cut his price target to $175 from $200 and kept his Outperform rating. That’s 70% above the Oct. 7 close.
UBS (to $150) and Argus (to $135, from $230) cut their targets the same week and kept Buy ratings.
Bulls can lean on demand. On the August call, Masters said “inventories are low and the physical lithium market remains tight.”
Does $175 add up?
BMO sits close to the pack. The average analyst target has dropped from $211 at the end of June to $169, while the stock fell from $135.03 to $102.75.
And the ratings have held: 13 of the 22 analysts rate it Buy or Outperform, up from 7 a year ago, and none rate it Sell.
Analysts expect normalized EPS of $11.60 in 2026 and $11.27 in 2027, after losses in 2024 and 2025.
Those estimates are still sliding: Yahoo Finance’s 2027 consensus fell to $11.00 from $12.98 over the last 90 days, and a weaker third quarter gives analysts little reason to stop.
At $102.75, Albemarle trades at 10.9x forward earnings. (Two years of losses make its five-year history useless.) BMO’s $175 divided by the $9.47 a share of next-twelve-months earnings behind that multiple works out to 18.5x.
Plausible, but stretched
The risk is the lithium price. Albemarle’s own 2026 outlook puts adjusted EBITDA at $2.4 billion to $2.6 billion with lithium around $20 per kilogram, and just $0.9 billion to $1.0 billion at 2025’s average of about $10.
So BMO’s call is plausible, but stretched. Analysts haven’t given up on the stock. But $175 asks the market to pay 18.5x for earnings that are still being marked down, and that needs lithium to hold near $20.
The next test is Nov. 4, when Albemarle reports its third quarter. If Energy Storage pricing holds up and the 2026 outlook stays at the high end of its $20 case, BMO’s target gets a lot easier to defend.
So what is Albemarle stock actually worth?
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Disclaimer:
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