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Leslie's, Inc. (NASDAQ:LESL) came out with its second-quarter results last week, and we wanted to see how the business is performing and what industry forecasters think of the company following this report. It was a moderately negative result overall - revenue fell 4.5% short of analyst estimates at US$189m, although at least statutory losses were marginally smaller than expected, at US$0.19 per share. Earnings are an important time for investors, as they can track a company's performance, look at what the analysts are forecasting for next year, and see if there's been a change in sentiment towards the company. So we collected the latest post-earnings statutory consensus estimates to see what could be in store for next year.
View our latest analysis for Leslie's
Taking into account the latest results, Leslie's' 13 analysts currently expect revenues in 2024 to be US$1.43b, approximately in line with the last 12 months. Statutory earnings per share are predicted to leap 193% to US$0.24. Before this earnings report, the analysts had been forecasting revenues of US$1.44b and earnings per share (EPS) of US$0.24 in 2024. The consensus analysts don't seem to have seen anything in these results that would have changed their view on the business, given there's been no major change to their estimates.
The consensus price target fell 6.2% to US$6.15, suggesting that the analysts might have been a bit enthusiastic in their previous valuation - or they were expecting the company to provide stronger guidance in the quarterly results. It could also be instructive to look at the range of analyst estimates, to evaluate how different the outlier opinions are from the mean. The most optimistic Leslie's analyst has a price target of US$9.00 per share, while the most pessimistic values it at US$5.00. 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.
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. It's pretty clear that there is an expectation that Leslie's' revenue growth will slow down substantially, with revenues to the end of 2024 expected to display 3.1% growth on an annualised basis. This is compared to a historical growth rate of 9.4% over the past five years. By way of comparison, the other companies in this industry with analyst coverage are forecast to grow their revenue at 4.9% per year. So it's pretty clear that, while revenue growth is expected to slow down, the wider industry is also expected to grow faster than Leslie's.