A 0-of-4 financial scorecard pairs cash-backed brand strength with negative free cash flow and a weak profit signal mid-turnaround. The stock trades at 79x earnings, 4% below its high, yet 20 analysts see only about 3.5% upside to a $108.27 average target — 57% Buy, 41% Hold. Current price: $104.06.
Changes over time: 1 discontinued (Seattle’s Best Coffee, last highlighted 2022), 2 New & Sustained, 2 Evolved, 1 New Products — a portfolio tightening around the core brand, digital and loyalty.
Starbucks operates across 89 markets, with growth resting on international expansion — particularly China — plus digital ordering, a large loyalty program and a push into delivery. The challenge framed in the filing is reigniting traffic in a mature U.S. store base while defending premium pricing against lower-priced competitors.
Margins are the pressure point. Starbucks still earns roughly an 8.4% operating margin and a 3.9% net margin, but trailing free cash flow has turned negative — a -3.4% levered free-cash-flow margin — as it reinvests in stores, labor and equipment during a turnaround. restnvest rates profit quality weak and the financial scorecard 0 of 4 strong; return on assets of 7.4% (used as a proxy because shareholder equity is negative after years of buybacks) frames a business funding a recovery rather than harvesting one.
Y = price target. X = days remaining on call (negative = past expected hit window). Bubble size = Anachart Performance Score. Dashed vertical = the expected-hit boundary.
Chart shows 5 of 20 covering analysts. See all on Anachart →
Starbucks sets a premium, cash-generative brand against a balance sheet and income statement still in repair. The supportive side is the franchise: scale economies, a large loyalty program and pricing power across 89 markets, with restnvest's valuation lens scoring 1 of 4 sensible only because capital discipline holds up. The cautious side is concrete: restnvest rates the financial scorecard 0 of 4 strong, profit quality is weak, trailing levered free cash flow is negative (-3.4% margin), and shareholder equity is negative after years of buybacks, so a 7.4% return on assets stands in as the return proxy. At 79x trailing earnings and 4% below its high, the stock already prices in a successful turnaround. The analyst lens leans positive but quietly — across 20 firms, 56.52% Buy, 40.58% Hold and 2.90% Sell, a 75.22% hit ratio, and the most recent action a TD Cowen Hold lifted to a $120 target. Yet the $108.27 average target implies only about 3.5% upside, the narrowest in this group. A long-term investor weighs a durable brand reinvesting through a soft patch against a valuation that leaves little room for error and a Street that, while constructive, is not pricing in much. Two data notes: revenue growth is the latest quarterly figure (8.8% year over year), as a clean annual figure was not available on the source page; and analyst performance scores use a hit-ratio-based 0-10 proxy applied consistently across this group rather than Anachart's subscription-gated native scores.
Dive deeper into the fundamentals
See Starbucks's full 6-stage analysis on restnvest →See the full analyst picture
See all 20 analyst price targets on Anachart →