What Happened?
Shares of footwear company Crocs (NASDAQ: CROX) jumped 7% in the afternoon session after Barclays upgraded the company to Overweight from Equal Weight and raised its price target to $139 from $118. According to StreetInsider, analyst Adrienne Yih said visibility into a broader recovery has improved. Crocs International is already growing, Crocs North America returned to growth in the second quarter, and she expects HEYDUDE to return to growth in the second half. She wrote that Crocs is moving past stabilization and into the early stage of a more durable growth cycle. Many of the best-selling products are newer lines outside the Classic Clog, and management expects sandals to approach $500 million in annual sales. The company has cut promotions, which has weighed on near-term revenue and shifted more sales to full price. Yih called international expansion underappreciated. The brand is still early in China, India, Japan, and Western Europe, and international sales are about 49% of Crocs brand revenue. She said investors can start valuing the stock on its earnings growth rather than on turnaround risk. Barclays raised its fiscal 2028 adjusted earnings estimate to $15.49 and used a nine-times multiple for the $139 target.
The shares closed the day at $124.73, up 6.1% from the previous close.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
Crocs’s shares are quite volatile and have had 17 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was 8 months ago when the stock gained 20.3% on the news that the company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results and issued a strong earnings outlook for 2026. For the quarter, the footwear maker posted revenue of $957.6 million and adjusted earnings of $2.29 per share, with both figures comfortably surpassing Wall Street's expectations. The main driver for the stock's jump, however, was the company's financial forecast. Crocs guided for adjusted earnings per share in 2026 to be in the range of $12.88 to $13.35, which was significantly above what analysts had modeled. This upbeat outlook suggested confidence in the company's future performance, overshadowing a year-on-year revenue decline and soft revenue guidance for the upcoming quarter.
Crocs is up 43.5% since the beginning of the year, but at $124.75 per share, it is still trading 11.6% below its 52-week high of $141.19 from August 2026. Despite the year-to-date gain, investors who bought $1,000 worth of Crocs’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at only $909.29.
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