Report date: August 5, 2026 (after market close) | Call: August 6, 2026, 11:00 a.m. ET
CF Industries reports second-quarter 2026 results tomorrow against a backdrop that has been dominated for five straight months by the Iran conflict and its cascading effects on global nitrogen trade. Shares have been extremely volatile in 2026 — rallying from ~$80 in January to a peak near $137 in mid-March as the Strait of Hormuz crisis erupted, then drifting back into the $105-$130 range through the spring/summer as markets tried to handicap how long the disruption would last. The stock closed at $118.14 on August 4, down from ~$127 just two weeks earlier, leaving it roughly flat-to-down over the past month heading into the print.
Wall Street consensus heading into the quarter calls for EPS of roughly $5.65-$5.71 and revenue near $2.45 billion, which would be more than double last year's Q2 EPS of $2.37. Analyst sentiment is mixed-to-positive: sell-side ratings skew toward "Hold" on a consensus basis (roughly 2 Strong Buy / 5 Buy / 10 Hold / 3 Sell per one tally), but price targets have been moving higher, with Scotiabank's FY2026 EPS estimate recently lifted to $16.20 and Barclays reiterating a Buy. CF has beaten consensus EPS in three of the last four quarters.
CF's Q1 2026 print set a high bar: net earnings of $615 million ($3.98/diluted share), adjusted EBITDA of $983 million, and net sales of $1.99 billion, all sharply ahead of Q1 2025's $312 million/$1.85/$644 million. Results included a roughly $170 million litigation settlement gain. Operationally, the company ran ammonia plants at 99% of available capacity, and average selling prices rose across every segment as average selling prices were higher for all segments in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025 due to a tight global nitrogen supply-demand balance, which was further tightened by supply disruptions related to the conflict with Iran. Natural gas costs also rose in Q1 (average cost in cost of sales of $4.57/MMBtu vs. $3.68/MMBtu a year earlier) as Henry Hub spiked in Jan-Feb.
Importantly, management guided full-year 2026 gross ammonia production down to ~9.5 million tons, because the ongoing outage at the Yazoo City, Mississippi, Complex as a result of an incident that occurred in late 2025... production to resume at the Yazoo City Complex until late fourth quarter of 2026 at the earliest. That lost volume is a headwind to watch on segment mix (it disproportionately hit UAN/AN/DEF volumes in Q1).
This is the crux of the Q2 story. Management's framing on the Q1 call was that the Iran conflict represents "the third major supply and demand shock to the global nitrogen market in the last 6 years" and has permanently altered the industry's risk-return framework — CEO Chris Bohn argued "we see a clear divide within the first quartile. North America... is low-cost and low-risk, representing premium-grade assets" versus Middle East capacity that is now viewed as structurally riskier.
Since that call, the situation has worsened rather than resolved: an interim US-Iran truce broke down on July 8 after renewed strikes on shipping in the Strait, reigniting disruption to a corridor that normally carries roughly a quarter to a third of globally traded ammonia and urea. The result: urea futures, which had cooled to around $420/tonne over the summer as talks progressed and China loosened export curbs, spiked back above $700/tonne by early August — the highest level since October 2022 — driven by renewed war-related supply fears. That is a live, very recent tailwind for CF's pricing outlook that postdates the quarter itself and will likely be a focal point on tomorrow's call, particularly for Q3/Q4 and 2027 guidance commentary.
At the same time, natural gas costs have been a significant offsetting tailwind for Q2 margins. After spiking above $7/MMBtu in February, Henry Hub fell to the $2.60-$2.80/MMBtu range through Q2 and into July — CF is unhedged on a forward basis, so the full benefit of cheap gas flows straight through to cost of sales. The combination of elevated urea/UAN/ammonia selling prices with cheap feedstock gas is the setup that has analysts modeling a sharp sequential and year-over-year margin expansion for Q2.
Other elements of the nitrogen market narrative to track on the call: - India import demand: Bert Frost's team flagged India's 2026 urea imports could reach 10-12 million metric tons, "nearly double their 2024 imports," driven by low starting inventories and constrained LNG-based domestic production. - China exports: expected to resume in a controlled fashion "later in the second quarter," but management was skeptical volumes could fully offset lost Middle Eastern supply. - Export restrictions elsewhere: Russia and Egypt (a new $90/tonne export duty) have both moved to restrict flows, tightening the market further.
Going into this print, the setup favors an EPS/EBITDA beat similar to Q1's pattern: strong North American operational execution, near-full capacity utilization outside of Yazoo City, historically wide urea/ammonia selling prices, and unusually cheap natural gas feedstock. The bigger swing factor for the stock reaction is likely to be forward commentary — how management characterizes the freshly re-escalated Strait of Hormuz conflict, the durability of the >$700/tonne urea price spike, India's import cadence, and the pace of capital returns — rather than the backward-looking Q2 numbers themselves, given how well telegraphed the tight nitrogen market has been all year. With the stock down from its March/July highs and trading below levels some sell-side models (e.g., Seeking Alpha contributors targeting $156, a ~29% premium) suggest is warranted on 2026 EBITDA, a confident tone on 2H26/2027 pricing and capital deployment could be the bigger catalyst than the quarter's raw EPS beat/miss.