The latest analyst coverage could presage a bad day for Funding Circle Holdings plc (LON:FCH), with the analysts making across-the-board cuts to their statutory estimates that might leave shareholders a little shell-shocked. Both revenue and earnings per share (EPS) estimates were cut sharply as analysts factored in the latest outlook for the business, concluding that they were too optimistic previously. The stock price has risen 9.0% to UK£0.73 over the past week. We'd be curious to see if the downgrade is enough to reverse investor sentiment on the business.

Following the latest downgrade, the three analysts covering Funding Circle Holdings provided consensus estimates of UK£164m revenue in 2022, which would reflect a painful 30% decline on its sales over the past 12 months. After this downgrade, the company is anticipated to report a loss of UK£0.047 in 2022, a sharp decline from a profit over the last year. Previously, the analysts had been modelling revenues of UK£214m and earnings per share (EPS) of UK£0.042 in 2022. So we can see that the consensus has become notably more bearish on Funding Circle Holdings' outlook with these numbers, making a sizeable cut to this year's revenue estimates. Furthermore, they expect the business to be loss-making this year, compared to their previous forecasts of a profit.

Check out our latest analysis for Funding Circle Holdings

The consensus price target fell 9.8% to UK£1.94, implicitly signalling that lower earnings per share are a leading indicator for Funding Circle Holdings' 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 Funding Circle Holdings, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at UK£3.26 and the most bearish at UK£1.40 per share. 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.

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 sales are expected to slow, with a forecast annualised revenue decline of 30% by the end of 2022. This indicates a significant reduction from annual growth of 18% 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 25% annually for the foreseeable future. So although its revenues are forecast to shrink, this cloud does not come with a silver lining - Funding Circle Holdings is expected to lag the wider industry.