In September 2017, International Consolidated Airlines Group SA (LSE:IAG) announced its most recent earnings update, which indicated that the company gained from a robust tailwind, leading to a double-digit earnings growth of 29.16%. Below, I’ve presented key growth figures on how market analysts perceive International Consolidated Airlines Group’s earnings growth trajectory over the next couple of years and whether the future looks even brighter than the past. I will be using net income excluding extraordinary items in order to exclude one-off volatility which I am not interested in. Check out our latest analysis for International Consolidated Airlines Group

Market analysts’ prospects for the upcoming year seems buoyant, with earnings growing by a robust 10.54%. This growth seems to continue into the following year with rates arriving at double digit 19.09% compared to today’s earnings, and finally hitting €2,795.4M by 2020.

Although it’s informative understanding the rate of growth year by year relative to today’s value, it may be more valuable estimating the rate at which the business is growing every year, on average. The pro of this method is that it removes the impact of near term flucuations and accounts for the overarching direction of International Consolidated Airlines Group’s earnings trajectory over time, which may be more relevant for long term investors. To calculate this rate, I’ve appended a line of best fit through the forecasted earnings by market analysts. The slope of this line is the rate of earnings growth, which in this case is 9.54%. This means that, we can anticipate International Consolidated Airlines Group will grow its earnings by 9.54% every year for the next couple of years.

Next Steps:

For International Consolidated Airlines Group, I’ve put together three key aspects you should further examine:

1. Financial Health: Does it have a healthy balance sheet? Take a look at our free balance sheet analysis with six simple checks on key factors like leverage and risk.

2. Valuation: What is IAG worth today? Is the stock undervalued, even when its growth outlook is factored into its intrinsic value? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether IAG is currently mispriced by the market.

3. Other High-Growth Alternatives : Are there other high-growth stocks you could be holding instead of IAG? Explore our interactive list of stocks with large growth potential to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!

To help readers see pass the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price sensitive company announcements.

The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned.