Shareholders might have noticed that K+S Aktiengesellschaft (ETR:SDF) filed its half-yearly result this time last week. The early response was not positive, with shares down 2.1% to €11.25 in the past week. Revenues of €1.9b were in line with expectations, although statutory losses per share were €0.03, some 10% smaller than was expected. 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. We thought readers would find it interesting to see the analysts latest (statutory) post-earnings forecasts for next year.

See our latest analysis for K+S

After the latest results, the consensus from K+S' 16 analysts is for revenues of €3.62b in 2024, which would reflect a perceptible 2.5% decline in revenue compared to the last year of performance. Per-share earnings are expected to shoot up 1,048% to €0.28. Yet prior to the latest earnings, the analysts had been anticipated revenues of €3.59b and earnings per share (EPS) of €0.29 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.

The consensus price target held steady at €14.35, with the analysts seemingly voting that their lower forecast earnings are not expected to lead to a lower stock price in the foreseeable future. That's not the only conclusion we can draw from this data however, as some investors also like to consider the spread in estimates when evaluating analyst price targets. The most optimistic K+S analyst has a price target of €19.00 per share, while the most pessimistic values it at €10.00. 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.

These estimates are interesting, but it can be useful to paint some more broad strokes when seeing how forecasts compare, both to the K+S' past performance and to peers in the same industry. These estimates imply that revenue is expected to slow, with a forecast annualised decline of 4.9% by the end of 2024. This indicates a significant reduction from annual growth of 12% 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 4.5% annually for the foreseeable future. It's pretty clear that K+S' revenues are expected to perform substantially worse than the wider industry.