Shareholders might have noticed that Iridium Communications Inc. (NASDAQ:IRDM) filed its first-quarter result this time last week. The early response was not positive, with shares down 6.9% to US$38.96 in the past week. It looks like a pretty bad result, all things considered. Although revenues of US$219m were in line with analyst predictions, statutory earnings fell badly short, missing estimates by 28% to hit US$0.20 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.
Taking into account the latest results, Iridium Communications’ eight analysts currently expect revenues in 2026 to be US$886.7m, approximately in line with the last 12 months. Statutory earnings per share are predicted to increase 9.3% to US$1.09. Before this earnings report, the analysts had been forecasting revenues of US$881.0m and earnings per share (EPS) of US$1.12 in 2026. The analysts seem to have become a little more negative on the business after the latest results, given the minor downgrade to their earnings per share numbers for next year.
View our latest analysis for Iridium Communications
Despite cutting their earnings forecasts,the analysts have lifted their price target 16% to US$35.14, suggesting that these impacts are not expected to weigh on the stock’s value in the long term. The consensus price target is just an average of individual analyst targets, so – it could be handy to see how wide the range of underlying estimates is. The most optimistic Iridium Communications analyst has a price target of US$48.00 per share, while the most pessimistic values it at US$16.00. 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.
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 pretty clear that there is an expectation that Iridium Communications’ revenue growth will slow down substantially, with revenues to the end of 2026 expected to display 1.7% growth on an annualised basis. This is compared to a historical growth rate of 8.4% over the past five years. Compare this against other companies (with analyst forecasts) in the industry, which are in aggregate expected to see revenue growth of 4.6% annually. So it’s pretty clear that, while revenue growth is expected to slow down, the wider industry is also expected to grow faster than Iridium Communications.
