Analysts Slash Circus Targets by Over 80% as EBITDA Loss Triples; €50 Million Financing Backs Defense Pivot
Published on 07/21/2026 at 18:07 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The wheels have come off Circus SE's near-term growth story in spectacular fashion. Within 48 hours, two research houses slashed their price targets by more than 80%, sending the stock into a tailspin that has wiped out over half its market value in a single week. The shares now trade at roughly €2.00, a collapse from levels that had supported targets as high as €46 just weeks earlier.
Montega led the downgrades, cutting its rating from "Buy" to "Hold" and slashing its price objective from €10.00 to €2.20. The brokerage pointed to scaling problems in Circus's robotics ecosystem and an increasingly uncertain funding picture. Hours later, mwb research followed suit: analyst Dr. Oliver Wojahn lowered his target from a towering €46.00 to €8.40 and downgraded the stock from "Buy" to "Speculative Buy," citing elevated operational risk and a cash burn rate that now looks severe.
The catalyst for the carnage is a revision of the 2026 guidance that has gutted the top line. Circus now expects revenue of just €5.2 million, down from an earlier forecast of €44 million to €55 million — a cut of roughly 90%. Even more alarming for the bottom line, the EBITDA loss has nearly tripled to around €17 million from a previously projected range of €6 million to €8 million. The culprit: a deliberate pushback of system deployments into 2027, a move the company says is necessary to ensure per-unit profitability before scaling.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Circus?
That strategic pause, however, has created a funding gap. To bridge it, Circus has signed a financing agreement with FINEXITY AG worth up to €50 million, structured to support capital market operations for its AI-robotics portfolio. Management insists the company's liquidity position remains adequate despite the higher-than-expected operating costs for onboarding, integration, and servicing of its autonomous food-supply systems.
The shift in focus is unmistakable. Circus is pivoting away from a volume-at-any-cost growth model toward institutional and defense clients. Its newly created Circus Defence unit has already deployed autonomous meal-prep systems with the Ukrainian Ground Forces' 3rd Assault Brigade near Kyiv — a battlefield test the company hopes will prove the technology's ruggedness under extreme conditions. Analysts view the defense angle as a potential stabilizer but stress that the coming quarters must demonstrate whether the technology can actually be scaled profitably.
On the operational front, Circus says it has made measurable progress in automation. The daily manual integration time for system operators has fallen to about 90 minutes for output of several hundred meals — a key benchmark in its quest for technical autonomy. Yet the new timeline puts any meaningful revenue contribution from system sales at least 18 months away.
Technical indicators now scream oversold. The relative-strength index has touched 13.5 to 13.7, levels that historically precede a bounce. But with a market capitalization that has shrunk to roughly €56 million, the market's risk assessment has been rewritten entirely. Whether Circus can regain credibility with a defense-driven narrative and a €50 million financial backstop — or whether the RSI signal is a false dawn — will depend on execution in the months ahead.
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