RingCentral Analysts Double Targets After Earnings Beat

RingCentral jumped 10.5% over the past week to $83.39, a move that looks smaller only because its closest software peers ran even harder, with Five9 up 16.7%, Asana up 21.9%, and Appian up 27.2% over the same stretch.

The clearest story this week is on the analyst tape, where the reaction to RingCentral's latest earnings was unusually uniform. Eight firms raised price targets on October 23 alone, with virtually no rating changes to go with them: the consensus stayed at hold, but the targets moved dramatically. UBS went from $45 to $105. Morgan Stanley's Elizabeth Porter lifted her target from $41 to $91. Jefferies moved from $40 to $75. The range of new targets runs from $75 at Jefferies up to $110 at both Oppenheimer and Needham, against a current price of $83. That leaves the mean target at $93.57, roughly 12% above where the stock closed, which is a narrower gap than the scale of the target revisions might imply. Most firms that moved kept neutral-equivalent ratings in place, so the message from the Street is roughly: the business is better than we thought, but we're not ready to call it a buy.

Short positioning has drifted in the opposite direction from the stock. Short interest fell around 4% on the week to 8.6% of free float, continuing a gradual unwind from a local peak near mid-October. The borrow market offers no sign of stress: cost to borrow is a modest 0.39%, down 15% on the week, and availability is exceptionally loose at over 2,200% of current short interest, meaning there are roughly 22 shares available to lend for every one already borrowed. That is well above the 52-week low of 181%. The ORTEX short score has also slipped from 49.7 two weeks ago to 47.3, drifting toward a more neutral reading. Covering into a rally this size would be painful for anyone short, but the data does not suggest a disorderly unwind: availability is ample and the cost to hold a short position is negligible.

The bull and bear cases have been well-defined for some time and the earnings print did little to resolve them. Bears point to Microsoft Teams Phone and Zoom's pricing power, the risk that AI features become commoditised rather than monetised, and the seat-based model's sensitivity to hiring slowdowns. The bear case is not obviously wrong: forward earnings momentum ranks only in the 37th percentile on a 30-day basis, and EV/EBITDA has compressed slightly over the past month to around 10.6x. On the other side, the company's EPS surprise factor sits in the 96th percentile, reflecting a consistent track record of beating estimates, and the sector score ranks in the 88th percentile. Bulls can also point to buyback activity: per SEC EDGAR filings captured by ORTEX, buyback spend in the most recent quarter ran 195% above the same quarter a year earlier.

On the ownership side, Sylebra Capital filed a Schedule 13D/A in July 2025 declaring an activist position, then holding just under 5% of shares. That filing is now more than a year old, and as the standard disclosure caveat applies, stakes around the 5% threshold are event-driven and a holder can fall below without filing again, so the current size of that position is unknown. The co-founders remain significant holders: CEO Vladimir Shmunis held 6.7% as of mid-June, though he sold just over $890,000 of stock in early September under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan. The CFO and President also sold under plans in the same period. Pre-planned sales carry less informational weight than discretionary ones, but the cluster of executive activity at prices in the low-to-mid $70s is worth noting given the stock now trades above $83.

The next scheduled earnings date is November 6, roughly two weeks away, and analyst targets have just been reset sharply higher. Whether the Street's new numbers prove conservative or generous is the question the print will answer.