Garmin stock hits $300 for the first time

Garmin shares have crossed $300 for the first time, setting a new all-time high after one of the sharpest rallies in the company’s recent history. It is quite a turnaround for a stock that was trading below $190 less than nine months ago. The company is now worth nearly $57 billion.

GRMN reached an intraday high of $304 on July 29 before ending the week at $293.78. Even after pulling back slightly, the company is up around 20% over the past five trading days and roughly 42% over six months.

From $187 to $304

It’s quite a remarkable turnaround.

Garmin shares closed at $187.10 on November 20 last year, after falling as low as $186.67 during the session. At the time, we covered the sharp decline as Garmin lost billions of dollars in market value following concerns around Outdoor growth and the timing of its Fenix launches.

From that November low to last week’s $304 peak, the stock has climbed about 62%. Even using Friday’s slightly lower closing price of $293.78, Garmin is still up roughly 57% from that trough.

That recovery did not happen in one go. By February, the stock had already climbed back towards $238 following Garmin’s full-year results, extending a rebound that had started around the holiday period. The share price then continued higher through the spring before breaking decisively through its previous record last week.

Before the latest move, Garmin’s previous all-time high stood at $273.32. The July 29 rally took the stock well beyond that level.

The company is now valued at around $56.7 billion based on Friday’s closing price.

Earnings provided the final push

The immediate trigger was Garmin’s second-quarter report on July 29. We have already gone into the wearable side of those results. The short version is that the underlying business remains strong enough for Garmin to increase its guidance, and investors responded far more enthusiastically than they did after several previous earnings reports.

There is an interesting contrast with last October and November. Garmin was still posting record revenue then, but weaker expectations around Outdoor were enough to send the stock sharply lower. Investors were paying more attention to what might happen next than to the numbers Garmin had already delivered.

This time the forward-looking message worked in Garmin’s favour. Management raised expected 2026 revenue from $7.9 billion to around $8.05 billion and increased its adjusted earnings forecast from $9.35 to $10 per share.

A very different Garmin from 20 years ago

The all-time chart also puts Garmin’s transformation into perspective.

Garmin went public in December 2000 at $14 per share, equivalent to $7 after its subsequent stock split. The company then became closely associated with standalone car navigation, and its nüvi products alone accounted for around 64% of total revenue in 2008.

That could easily have become a problem once smartphones made dedicated navigation devices far less important. Instead, Garmin gradually built sizeable businesses around fitness, outdoor products, aviation and marine electronics.

Wearables now sit at the centre of that shift. Garmin’s Fitness division generated $757 million in revenue during the latest quarter, while the company continues to expand beyond traditional GPS watches with products such as CIRQA and its growing training ecosystem.

There will inevitably be more swings in the share price. Garmin went from around $260 to $187 in little more than a month last year, so the recent run is a useful reminder of how quickly investor sentiment can move.

But $304 is now the number to beat. For the first time in Garmin’s history, the company has traded above $300 a share, completing a rather dramatic recovery from where things stood only last November.