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It's been a pretty great week for Sinclair, Inc. (NASDAQ:SBGI) shareholders, with its shares surging 14% to US$15.00 in the week since its latest quarterly results. It looks like a credible result overall - although revenues of US$798m were what the analysts expected, Sinclair surprised by delivering a statutory profit of US$0.35 per share, instead of the previously forecast loss. This is an important time for investors, as they can track a company's performance in its report, look at what experts are forecasting for next year, and see if there has been any change to expectations for the business. 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 Sinclair
Taking into account the latest results, the current consensus from Sinclair's eight analysts is for revenues of US$3.50b in 2024. This would reflect a notable 11% increase on its revenue over the past 12 months. Earnings are expected to improve, with Sinclair forecast to report a statutory profit of US$2.76 per share. In the lead-up to this report, the analysts had been modelling revenues of US$3.53b and earnings per share (EPS) of US$2.64 in 2024. So the consensus seems to have become somewhat more optimistic on Sinclair's earnings potential following these results.
The consensus price target was unchanged at US$16.09, implying that the improved earnings outlook is not expected to have a long term impact on value creation for shareholders. There's another way to think about price targets though, and that's to look at the range of price targets put forward by analysts, because a wide range of estimates could suggest a diverse view on possible outcomes for the business. There are some variant perceptions on Sinclair, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at US$29.00 and the most bearish at US$10.00 per share. So we wouldn't be assigning too much credibility to analyst price targets in this case, because there are clearly some widely different views on what kind of performance this business can generate. As a result it might not be a great idea to make decisions based on the consensus price target, which is after all just an average of this wide range of estimates.
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. One thing stands out from these estimates, which is that Sinclair is forecast to grow faster in the future than it has in the past, with revenues expected to display 15% annualised growth until the end of 2024. If achieved, this would be a much better result than the 4.0% annual decline over the past five years. Compare this against analyst estimates for the broader industry, which suggest that (in aggregate) industry revenues are expected to grow 3.2% annually. Not only are Sinclair's revenues expected to improve, it seems that the analysts are also expecting it to grow faster than the wider industry.