It's been a year of redemption and consumption for functional-beverages specialist Celsius Holdings (CELH 2.15%). The stock has been one of the biggest surprises of 2025, up a head-turning 129% heading into this critical trading week.
A game-changing acquisition and the return to heady growth have justified the upticks, but is it too late to crack open a can now? Everyone knows what happens to a carbonated beverage after it's been left open for too long. Will 2026 be just as effervescent as this year?
Beverage-stock investors will get their last peek at financials during the 2025 calendar year when Celsius announces its third-quarter results on Thursday. If the company is going to be another big winner in 2026, it can't afford to flunk its last major test of this year.
NASDAQ: CELH
Key Data Points
It's time to drink or swim
It's hard to find a more transformative acquisition this year than when Celsius announced its $1.8 billion acquisition of Alani Nu in February. The deal was worth closer to $1.65 billion after accounting for a $150 million tax benefit going Celsius' way, suggesting that the smaller lifestyle brand it was acquiring had a cumulative history of red ink to toss into the dowry.
The net price of the deal came out to mere 3x Alani Nu's trailing sales and a modest 12x its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), adjusted for cost savings Celsius envisioned in combining the two brands. Celsius itself was trading at a higher sales multiple and an enterprise value that was more than triple its adjusted EBITDA forecast for Alani Nu.
The deal closed at the start of the second quarter, less than six weeks since it was announced. There was no regulatory resistance to clearing the transaction.
Celsius needed the acquisition even more than Alani Nu needed to be acquired at its fire-sale asking price. After three consecutive years of revenue more than doubling, Celsius was reeling. Revenue growth decelerated sharply in the first half of 2024 before turning negative in the final two quarters of the year. The first quarter of this year was more of the same.
Investors started bidding Celsius up this year in anticipation of the potential for the corporate combination. The company's shares shed more than half of their value in 2024, so a bounce on a glimmer of hope in 2025 was understandable. Reality was even kinder than what optimists were expecting.
Image source: Getty Images.
A different kind of adrenaline boost
Celsius poured out blowout second-quarter results this summer. Analysts figured the strong growth at Alani Nu -- despite generating less than a third of Celsius' revenue -- would translate into a 64% year-over-year pop in sales for the combined company. The $739.3 million that Celsius reported was a much better 84% jump. The quarter's adjusted profit was $0.47 a share, a 68% increase on the bottom line and almost double the $0.24 a share that Wall Street pros were modeling.
The beat was scored on the unexpected profitability for Alani Nu, as well as the Celsius brand itself coming through with a 3% uptick in organic sales. It was a turnaround that made growth investors turn around. Can the story get better this week?
Analysts see sales soaring 169% to $715.7 million for the third quarter that Celsius will announce on Thursday morning, but don't let the triple-digit jump get you too excited. The third quarter was a disaster last year for Celsius. Its top line plummeted 31%, as Celsius distributor and minority shareholder PepsiCo went through a brutal supply-chain optimization to adapt to last summer's slowdown in energy-drink sales. Analysts also see a profit of $0.24 a share in Thursday's update, compared to breakeven results a year earlier.
It should still be an impressive showing for both brands, given Alani Nu's strong sales momentum and Celsius' depressed results a year earlier. It will also be interesting to get some color into this summer's transaction in which PepsiCo boosted its stake in Celsius from 8% to 11% in exchange for handing over North American rights for the Rockstar energy-drink line.
Can the story get better next year? The year-over-year comparisons will continue to be juicy as a result of the non-organic growth through the end of the first quarter in 2026. A strong showing this week -- beyond just the top line -- will go a long way to convince skeptical growth-stock investors that Celsius has earned back its racing stripes.
The stock may not seem cheap at nearly 40x forward earnings, but another strong "beat and raise" performance this week should send analyst growth expectations higher and multiples lower. As long as momentum is back across all of its product offerings by the springtime of next year, Celsius should continue to deliver market-beating results in 2026. Doubling again next year is unlikely, but the ingredients are in place for another strong year for Celsius and its investors.
