How Do Analysts See L’Air Liquide SA (EPA:AI) Performing In The Year Ahead?
Looking at L’Air Liquide SA’s (EPA:AI) earnings update in June 2018, analyst forecasts seem fairly subdued, with earnings expected to grow by 0.2% in the upcoming year against the higher past 5-year average growth rate of 5.8%. Presently, with latest-twelve-month earnings at €2.32b, we should see this growing to €2.32b by 2019. In this article, I’ve outline a few earnings growth rates to give you a sense of the market sentiment for L’Air Liquide S.A in the longer term. For those keen to understand more about other aspects of the company, you can research its fundamentals here.
View our latest analysis for L’Air Liquide S.A
How will L’Air Liquide S.A perform in the near future?
Longer term expectations from the 19 analysts covering AI’s stock is one of positive sentiment. Since forecasting becomes more difficult further into the future, broker analysts generally project out to around three years. To get an idea of the overall earnings growth trend for AI, I’ve plotted out each year’s earnings expectations and inserted a line of best fit to determine an annual rate of growth from the slope of this line.
This results in an annual growth rate of 7.9% based on the most recent earnings level of €2.24b to the final forecast of €2.66b by 2021. EPS reaches €6.34 in the final year of forecast compared to the current €5.25 EPS today. The bottom-line growth seems to be caused by cost cutting activities, as revenues is expected to grow much slower than earnings. With a current profit margin of 11.0%, this movement will result in a margin of 11.3% by 2021.
Next Steps:
Future outlook is only one aspect when you’re building an investment case for a stock. For L’Air Liquide S.A, there are three key aspects you should look at:
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.
Valuation: What is L’Air Liquide S.A 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 L’Air Liquide S.A is currently mispriced by the market.
Other High-Growth Alternatives : Are there other high-growth stocks you could be holding instead of L’Air Liquide S.A? 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 past 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. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
