It's been a good week for First Merchants Corporation (NASDAQ:FRME) shareholders, because the company has just released its latest second-quarter results, and the shares gained 6.8% to US$41.35. Statutory earnings per share of US$0.68 unfortunately missed expectations by 13%, although it was encouraging to see revenues of US$166m exceed expectations by 3.3%. The analysts typically update their forecasts at each earnings report, and we can judge from their estimates whether their view of the company has changed or if there are any new concerns to be aware of. So we collected the latest post-earnings statutory consensus estimates to see what could be in store for next year.

Check out our latest analysis for First Merchants

Taking into account the latest results, the consensus forecast from First Merchants' five analysts is for revenues of US$652.2m in 2024. This reflects a decent 8.5% improvement in revenue compared to the last 12 months. Statutory per-share earnings are expected to be US$3.17, roughly flat on the last 12 months. In the lead-up to this report, the analysts had been modelling revenues of US$648.3m and earnings per share (EPS) of US$3.25 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 small dip in their earnings per share forecasts.

It might be a surprise to learn that the consensus price target was broadly unchanged at US$42.60, with the analysts clearly implying that the forecast decline in earnings is not expected to have much of an impact on valuation. 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. There are some variant perceptions on First Merchants, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at US$45.00 and the most bearish at US$40.00 per share. Even so, with a relatively close grouping of estimates, it looks like the analysts are quite confident in their valuations, suggesting First Merchants is an easy business to forecast or the the analysts are all using similar assumptions.

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. The analysts are definitely expecting First Merchants' growth to accelerate, with the forecast 18% annualised growth to the end of 2024 ranking favourably alongside historical growth of 10% per annum over the past five years. Compare this with other companies in the same industry, which are forecast to grow their revenue 6.4% annually. It seems obvious that, while the growth outlook is brighter than the recent past, the analysts also expect First Merchants to grow faster than the wider industry.