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Last week, you might have seen that Hapag-Lloyd Aktiengesellschaft (ETR:HLAG) released its annual result to the market. The early response was not positive, with shares down 7.2% to €124 in the past week. The result was positive overall - although revenues of €18b were in line with what the analysts predicted, Hapag-Lloyd surprised by delivering a statutory profit of €16.70 per share, modestly greater than expected. This is an important time for investors, as they can track a company's performance in its report, look at what experts are forecasting for next year, and see if there has been any change to expectations for the business. We thought readers would find it interesting to see the analysts latest (statutory) post-earnings forecasts for next year.
View our latest analysis for Hapag-Lloyd
After the latest results, the consensus from Hapag-Lloyd's nine analysts is for revenues of €16.1b in 2024, which would reflect a chunky 10% decline in revenue compared to the last year of performance. Statutory earnings per share are forecast to dive 75% to €4.13 in the same period. In the lead-up to this report, the analysts had been modelling revenues of €16.1b and earnings per share (EPS) of €4.39 in 2024. So it looks like there's been a small decline in overall sentiment after the recent results - there's been no major change to revenue estimates, but the analysts did make a minor downgrade to their earnings per share forecasts.
It might be a surprise to learn that the consensus price target was broadly unchanged at €103, with the analysts clearly implying that the forecast decline in earnings is not expected to have much of an impact on valuation. The consensus price target is just an average of individual analyst targets, so - it could be handy to see how wide the range of underlying estimates is. There are some variant perceptions on Hapag-Lloyd, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at €150 and the most bearish at €65.00 per share. This is a fairly broad spread of estimates, suggesting that analysts are forecasting a wide range of possible outcomes for the business.
Taking a look at the bigger picture now, one of the ways we can understand these forecasts is to see how they compare to both past performance and industry growth estimates. These estimates imply that revenue is expected to slow, with a forecast annualised decline of 10% by the end of 2024. This indicates a significant reduction from annual growth of 21% over the last five years. By contrast, our data suggests that other companies (with analyst coverage) in the same industry are forecast to see their revenue grow 1.6% annually for the foreseeable future. So although its revenues are forecast to shrink, this cloud does not come with a silver lining - Hapag-Lloyd is expected to lag the wider industry.