Market forces rained on the parade of Cytokinetics, Incorporated (NASDAQ:CYTK) shareholders today, when the analysts downgraded their forecasts for this year. Revenue estimates were cut sharply as analysts signalled a weaker outlook - perhaps a sign that investors should temper their expectations as well.

After the downgrade, the 19 analysts covering Cytokinetics are now predicting revenues of US$35m in 2025. If met, this would reflect a substantial 89% improvement in sales compared to the last 12 months. Losses are expected to increase substantially, hitting US$5.72 per share. Yet before this consensus update, the analysts had been forecasting revenues of US$48m and losses of US$5.33 per share in 2025. So there's been quite a change-up of views after the recent consensus updates, with the analysts making a serious cut to their revenue forecasts while also expecting losses per share to increase.

See our latest analysis for Cytokinetics

The consensus price target was broadly unchanged at US$79.10, perhaps implicitly signalling that the weaker earnings outlook is not expected to have a long-term impact on the valuation.

These estimates are interesting, but it can be useful to paint some more broad strokes when seeing how forecasts compare, both to the Cytokinetics' past performance and to peers in the same industry. One thing stands out from these estimates, which is that Cytokinetics is forecast to grow faster in the future than it has in the past, with revenues expected to display 89% annualised growth until the end of 2025. If achieved, this would be a much better result than the 12% annual decline over the past five years. By contrast, our data suggests that other companies (with analyst coverage) in the industry are forecast to see their revenue grow 20% per year. So it looks like Cytokinetics is expected to grow faster than its competitors, at least for a while.

The Bottom Line

The most important thing to take away is that analysts increased their loss per share estimates for this year. Unfortunately, analysts also downgraded their revenue estimates, although our data indicates revenues are expected to perform better than the wider market. Given the stark change in sentiment, we'd understand if investors became more cautious on Cytokinetics after today.

Even so, the longer term trajectory of the business is much more important for the value creation of shareholders. We have estimates - from multiple Cytokinetics analysts - going out to 2027, and you can see them free on our platform here.

Of course, seeing company management invest large sums of money in a stock can be just as useful as knowing whether analysts are downgrading their estimates. So you may also wish to search this free list of stocks with high insider ownership.

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