Improved forecast for Manhattan Associates in 2026 helps lift battered stock price

What appeared to give the company’s stock price a boost was Manhattan’s projections for its 2026 performance, which were higher than the forecast it released when its fourth quarter earnings were published at the end of January.

Manhattan’s latest forecast calls for an adjusted full-year EPS of $5.29 to $5.37 per share. The prior forecast was for a range of $5.04 to $5.20. Full-year 2025 non-GAAP earnings per share was $5.06.

Its revenue forecast rose to a range of $1.147 billion to $1.157 billion, up from $1.133 billion to $1.153 billion. For full year 2025, revenue was $1.081 billion.

Still down from 52-week and all-time peaks

Even after the increase in its stock price Wednesday, Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH) was down 11.8% for the 12 months and a little less than 16% for the most recent three months. Its recent stock price is well under the 52-week high recorded July 23 of $247.22 and far less than the few days in early December 2024 when it crossed the $300 mark. 

In its earnings call, President and CEO Erick Clark said the company is “off to a strong start to 2026.” 

Manhattan’s revenue for its cloud-based product was up 24.2% year-on-year. The company’s remaining performance obligations (RPO), which represents revenue that has been contracted for but not yet booked, was up 24% year on year in the quarter to $2.35 billion. 

Shifting to the cloud

Clark said new customer bookings were also solid, with 55% of new revenue for its cloud-based service coming from new logos, companies that had not been a Manhattan customer previously.

“Throughout 2025, we spoke about the strategic investments that we’re making to improve our go-to-market effectiveness and accelerate our selling velocity,” Clark said. “And while results from these initiatives will certainly not be linear, these investments have started to pay off in the first quarter.”

Clark ticked off other accomplishments, saying Manhattan had “notable deal volume improvements across all deal types” and “strong bookings from all regions.”

“Our win rate metric continues to be consistently above 70%, and our renewal performance was solid and supportive of the plan that we highlighted last quarter,” Clark said. 

Clark, during the question and answer session with analysts, said Manhattan has been “really strong in the past five quarters of bringing in new logos. And we continue to see a great pipeline, and we continue to have great win rates against our competitors.”

Although the growth in cloud services was strong, Clark said the company “still has a large installed base (not running in the cloud) and a large opportunity to go do additional conversions” to a customer now using installed software and shifting them to the cloud.

Clark also boasted that “some of our competitors in the industry…haven’t made the investments in cloud and haven’t made the investments in a unified platform. We continue to have just kind of off-the-chart win rates when we compete for their incumbents, and we’re taking a lot of business from our competitors.”

Agentic AI

Part of Manhattan’s customer base is working on pilot programs driven by agentic AI. Clark spoke at length about the functions the agents can perform and that there have been customers who quickly went from pilot to subscribing to these agents. 

“There have been customers that have justified the entire ROI just by reduction in overtime,” Clark said. “So when they look at all the different ways they can get value out of these AI agents, we aren’t seeing customers have a problem justifying the ROI of what they’re getting.”

The expectations for the financial effect of agentic AI on Manhattan’s finances in 2026 is conservative, Clark said, but that he expected a “meaningful” impact in 2027.

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