Here's Why Albemarle Stock Surged Higher This Week

Lithium materials company (NYSE: ALB) received four analyst price target upgrades this week, ranging from $180 to $210. A cynic would argue that Wall Street is merely catching up with the stock's 125% price rise to around $188 as I write, but more to it than that. The company's fundamentals and end markets are improving, and the good news was enough to send the stock more than 16% higher this week.

The analyst upgrades highlight many of the stock's key strengths. A combination of Albemarle's cost-cutting measures, a doubling in the price of lithium carbonate over the last year, and a growing energy storage market providing an increasingly strong pillar of growth in lithium demand means that Albemarle is ideally placed to dramatically increase profits in 2026.

Indeed, the Wall Street analyst consensus calls for Albemarle's earnings per share to improve to $2.29 in 2026 from a loss of $0.84 in 2025. It would be a dramatic reversal of fortune, and it speaks to the classical cyclical conditions that lithium appears to be under right now. In other words, there was a boom in lithium demand coming from the traditional source (electric vehicle batteries) when automakers ramped up investment as they battled to establish a foothold in the EV market during the lockdown periods, only to rein in investment as EV sales didn't quite develop as expected.

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Source Fool.com