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The investors in Hapag-Lloyd Aktiengesellschaft's (ETR:HLAG) will be rubbing their hands together with glee today, after the share price leapt 29% to €167 in the week following its first-quarter results. Revenues were in line with forecasts, at €5.1b, although statutory earnings per share came in 16% below what the analysts expected, at €2.51 per share. Following the result, the analysts have updated their earnings model, and it would be good to know whether they think there's been a strong change in the company's prospects, or if it's business as usual. So we collected the latest post-earnings statutory consensus estimates to see what could be in store for next year.
After the latest results, the consensus from Hapag-Lloyd's ten analysts is for revenues of €18.1b in 2025, which would reflect a considerable 9.0% decline in revenue compared to the last year of performance. Statutory earnings per share are forecast to tumble 59% to €5.96 in the same period. Before this earnings report, the analysts had been forecasting revenues of €17.3b and earnings per share (EPS) of €4.24 in 2025. So it seems there's been a definite increase in optimism about Hapag-Lloyd's future following the latest results, with a very substantial lift in the earnings per share forecasts in particular.
Check out our latest analysis for Hapag-Lloyd
With these upgrades, we're not surprised to see that the analysts have lifted their price target 5.2% to €118per share. 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. The most optimistic Hapag-Lloyd analyst has a price target of €170 per share, while the most pessimistic values it at €75.00. 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.
One way to get more context on these forecasts is to look at how they compare to both past performance, and how other companies in the same industry are performing. These estimates imply that revenue is expected to slow, with a forecast annualised decline of 12% by the end of 2025. This indicates a significant reduction from annual growth of 6.9% over the last five years. Yet aggregate analyst estimates for other companies in the industry suggest that industry revenues are forecast to decline 0.9% per year. So it's pretty clear that Hapag-Lloyd's revenues are expected to shrink faster than the wider industry.