Celsius Stock Slid Nearly 7% After Barclays, and the Real Payoff It Described Waits Until 2027

Key Stats for Celsius Stock

• Current Price: $27.64
• Target Price (Mid): ~$44
• Street Target: ~$42
• Potential Total Return: ~60%
• Annualized Return: ~11% / year

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What Happened?

Celsius Holdings (CELH) closed at $27.64 on September 9, down 6.5% and back near the low end of its 52-week range, a day after CEO John Fieldly and CFO Jarrod Langhans took the stage at the Barclays Global Consumer Conference. What they described was a credible plan to turn a three-brand portfolio into stronger pricing and margins. What they could not offer was speed: the biggest profit lever does not arrive until 2027.

Rockstar founder Russ Savage, who sold the brand to PepsiCo in 2020, says he has built a stake of roughly 4.7% and is publicly demanding the CEO’s removal. Days after that demand, the company’s president and COO departed in what Celsius framed as an organizational realignment. So management walked into Barclays, selling patience to a market that has an activist arguing that patience is the problem.

What Barclays Was Trying to Answer For

Revenue of $817.9 million grew about 11% year over year but landed roughly 6% below the $870 million analysts expected, and adjusted EPS of $0.36 missed the $0.42 estimate. Underneath the headline, the flagship CELSIUS brand saw net sales fall about 12%, and stripping out newly acquired Rockstar left total portfolio sales up only around 1.6%. That last number is the heart of the bear case, and it is exactly what Savage points to: without the acquisitions, the core is barely growing.

So when Fieldly repeated at Barclays that the team “really went too deep” simplifying the CELSIUS lineup this year, cutting slow SKUs without permanent innovation to replace them, he was explaining the 12% decline, not deflecting it. Scans are running down 5% to 10%. The counterargument he and Langhans offered is granular: the remaining singles, about 70% of the business, are growing double digits, and productivity per point of distribution rose 16% from the first to the second quarter, even as the company shed 7% of its distribution points, per the investor relations materials.

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The Profit Lever That Waits Until 2027

The genuinely new material from Barclays was revenue growth management. This is the first year Celsius owns all three brands (CELSIUS, Alani Nu, and Rockstar), and until now, their commercial plans were built brand by brand rather than as a portfolio. Those changes in 2027, and Fieldly called it the company’s single largest opportunity.

Langhans described a price-pack architecture that sets Alani Nu as super-premium, CELSIUS as premium, and Rockstar as premium-economy, so a shopper never sees Rockstar priced above CELSIUS on the same shelf. It sequences promotions so the three brands stop discounting against each other and instead take turns attacking Monster and Red Bull. It means not marking down a sold-out limited flavor like the Alani Nu Witch’s Brew launch, because it moves regardless. Langhans was blunt that the real dollars here are “a ’27 and ’28 play,” not a back-half-2026 rescue.

Celsius trades at roughly 12x NTM EV/EBITDA against Monster near 26x and Keurig Dr Pepper at 11x, per TIKR’s Competitors data, and at about 18x forward earnings versus Monster’s 35x. The beverage-peer average sits near 15x on EV/EBITDA. The discount is not irrational: Monster runs a mid-50s gross margin with a stable core, while Celsius sat at 48% in the second quarter, squeezed by the Midwest aluminum premium, the London Metal Exchange, and freight, while absorbing two acquisitions and a shrinking flagship. Savage’s campaign is essentially a bet that the current team will not close that gap fast enough, and the COO’s departure showed the pressure is already reshaping the C-suite. The bull’s counter is that the price-pack work plus a second manufacturing line running fully by the fourth quarter drag margin back toward the low 50s over 2027 and 2028. Underneath it sits the growth of the market underweights: Alani Nu keeps pulling new, increasingly male buyers into the category through convenience, and heads international for the first time in 2027 across the Suntory-partnered markets.

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TIKR Advanced Model Analysis

• Current Price: $27.64
• Target Price (Mid): ~$44
• Potential Total Return: ~60%
• Annualized Return: ~11% / year

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Using TIKR’s mid-case scenario, the model values Celsius at around $44 by the end of 2030, roughly 60% total return from today, or about 11% annualized over the next four-plus years. The bull, or high, case in the model reaches about $78 on the same horizon.

• Revenue driver 1: the portfolio revenue growth management program (price-pack architecture and promotional sequencing), which Langhans framed as a 2027 and 2028 opportunity.
• Revenue driver 2: Alani Nu’s 2027 international rollout and continued convenience-channel expansion into new consumers.
• Margin driver: supply-chain integration of Alani Nu and Rockstar, plus the second manufacturing line, is assumed to lift gross margin toward the low 50s.
• Primary risk: the CELSIUS brand. If the flagship does not stabilize as the SKU-cut drag fades in early 2027, the roughly 1.6% ex-Rockstar growth from the second quarter does not improve, and the activist’s impatience looks vindicated.

The upside: base SKUs already growing double digits, plus returning permanent innovation, push CELSIUS back to growth in 2027 while margins climb and the multiple re-rates toward peers. The downside: commodity costs stay high and the flagship keeps shrinking, leaving a slower, lower-margin business than the acquisitions promised.

Conclusion

The number that settles this is the CELSIUS brand scan growth. The first checkpoint is the third-quarter report, expected around November 9, 2026: watch whether the weekly IRI scans have moved off the down 5% to 10% range toward flat, and whether ex-Rockstar portfolio growth improves on the second quarter’s 1.6%. Management pointed to the first half of 2027, when the SKU-cut drag fully rolls off and permanent innovation returns to shelves, as the real inflection. If the scans are still negative when Celsius reports first-quarter 2027 results next spring, the recovery has slipped again, the discount to Monster is deserved, and Savage’s case gets louder. If they turn, a stock near its 52-week low at 18x forward earnings is the entry that bulls have waited two years for.

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Should You Invest in Celsius?

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Pull up Celsius, and you’ll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down.

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Disclaimer:

Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!