Why Is Papa John's (PZZA) Stock Rocketing Higher Today

What Happened?

Shares of fast-food pizza chain Papa John’s (NASDAQ:PZZA) jumped 10.7% in the afternoon session after Apollo Global Management and a Qatari investment fund made a bid to take the company private. The reported takeover bid, valued PZZA at roughly $2 billion, represents a significant premium to Papa John's stock price before it was made public.

The shares closed the day at $51.78, up 7.5% from previous close.

Is now the time to buy Papa John's? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.

What The Market Is Telling Us

Papa John’s shares are very volatile and have had 20 moves greater than 5% over the last year. But moves this big are rare even for Papa John's and indicate this news significantly impacted the market’s perception of the business.

The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was about 1 month ago when the stock gained 15.3% on the news that the company reported decent first quarter 2025 results which included a narrow beat on same-store sales and full-year EBITDA guidance that slightly exceeded Wall Street's expectations, although EBITDA slightly missed. Sales rose just 1% from the previous year, with more money coming in from its food supply and ad units. This helped balance out the drop from weaker sales at company-run stores, especially in the U.K., where many shops closed or were sold. Overall, this print had some key positives.

Papa John's is up 19.5% since the beginning of the year, but at $51.72 per share, it is still trading 11.1% below its 52-week high of $58.21 from November 2024. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Papa John’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $657.82.

Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.