Last week, you might have seen that YouGov plc (LON:YOU) released its annual result to the market. The early response was not positive, with shares down 5.1% to UK£7.84 in the past week. Sales of UK£221m surpassed estimates by 2.6%, although statutory earnings per share missed badly, coming in 26% below expectations at UK£0.15 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. With this in mind, we've gathered the latest statutory forecasts to see what the analysts are expecting for next year.

See our latest analysis for YouGov

After the latest results, the five analysts covering YouGov are now predicting revenues of UK£261.5m in 2023. If met, this would reflect a solid 18% improvement in sales compared to the last 12 months. Statutory earnings per share are predicted to soar 95% to UK£0.30. In the lead-up to this report, the analysts had been modelling revenues of UK£259.1m and earnings per share (EPS) of UK£0.30 in 2023. So it's pretty clear that, although the analysts have updated their estimates, there's been no major change in expectations for the business following the latest results.

The consensus price target fell 7.0% to UK£14.30, 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 annual 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. There are some variant perceptions on YouGov, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at UK£16.40 and the most bearish at UK£12.00 per share. As you can see, analysts are not all in agreement on the stock's future, but the range of estimates is still reasonably narrow, which could suggest that the outcome is not totally unpredictable.

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. It's clear from the latest estimates that YouGov's rate of growth is expected to accelerate meaningfully, with the forecast 18% annualised revenue growth to the end of 2023 noticeably faster than its historical growth of 13% p.a. over the past five years. By contrast, our data suggests that other companies (with analyst coverage) in a similar industry are forecast to grow their revenue at 6.9% per year. It seems obvious that, while the growth outlook is brighter than the recent past, the analysts also expect YouGov to grow faster than the wider industry.