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Last week saw the newest quarterly earnings release from Fortive Corporation (NYSE:FTV), an important milestone in the company's journey to build a stronger business. Fortive reported in line with analyst predictions, delivering revenues of US$1.5b and statutory earnings per share of US$0.50, suggesting the business is executing well and in line with its plan. Earnings are an important time for investors, as they can track a company's performance, look at what the analysts are forecasting for next year, and see if there's been a change in sentiment towards the company. Readers will be glad to know we've aggregated the latest statutory forecasts to see whether the analysts have changed their mind on Fortive after the latest results.
Following last week's earnings report, Fortive's 17 analysts are forecasting 2025 revenues to be US$6.22b, approximately in line with the last 12 months. Statutory per-share earnings are expected to be US$2.36, roughly flat on the last 12 months. In the lead-up to this report, the analysts had been modelling revenues of US$6.26b and earnings per share (EPS) of US$2.53 in 2025. 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.
Check out our latest analysis for Fortive
The consensus price target held steady at US$83.60, with the analysts seemingly voting that their lower forecast earnings are not expected to lead to a lower stock price in the foreseeable future. Fixating on a single price target can be unwise though, since the consensus target is effectively the average of analyst price targets. As a result, some investors like to look at the range of estimates to see if there are any diverging opinions on the company's valuation. Currently, the most bullish analyst values Fortive at US$121 per share, while the most bearish prices it at US$67.00. Note the wide gap in analyst price targets? This implies to us that there is a fairly broad range of possible scenarios for the underlying business.
Looking at the bigger picture now, one of the ways we can make sense of these forecasts is to see how they measure up against both past performance and industry growth estimates. It's pretty clear that there is an expectation that Fortive's revenue growth will slow down substantially, with revenues to the end of 2025 expected to display 0.9% growth on an annualised basis. This is compared to a historical growth rate of 10% over the past five years. By way of comparison, the other companies in this industry with analyst coverage are forecast to grow their revenue at 3.9% per year. So it's pretty clear that, while revenue growth is expected to slow down, the wider industry is also expected to grow faster than Fortive.