Rocket Lab rises as Citi lifts price target to $50

Rocket Lab shares jumped after Citi analysts raised their price target on the stock to $50 from $33, citing a shifting methodology for how it’s looking at the company.

The analysts said they’re now basing their price target on their expectations for where the business will be in 2029, their previous point being 2027. They wrote:

“We believe that period better reflects a more mature state of the company’s business model. In that period, we expect revenue to grow to roughly $2.6B driven by 20 Neutron launches per year and further satellite construction wins, particularly for US government programs.”

Rocket Lab has been on a remarkable romp over the last year, surging over 650%.

The stock more than doubled in the last three months alone, as some traders seem to have bet that Rocket Lab may benefit from the rapid disassembly of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s relationship with the Trump administration. The fallout could be bad for Musk’s SpaceX... which Rocket Lab competes with.

But expectations aren’t realities. Rocket Lab has significant business hurdles to clear this year, foremost among them the first launches of its bigger Neutron rocket, which is mission critical for the company’s plan to start ferrying larger and more profitable payloads to space, as Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck told Sherwood News not too long ago.

Those rockets — which haven’t yet flown — are part of the justification for Citi analysts’ price target for the stock, an example of some of the highly optimistic thinking that seems to be everywhere in the market at the moment.