Shareholders might have noticed that AMC Networks Inc. (NASDAQ:AMCX) filed its full-year result this time last week. The early response was not positive, with shares down 9.4% to US$8.79 in the past week. Revenues came in at US$2.4b, in line with estimates, while AMC Networks reported a statutory loss of US$5.10 per share, well short of prior analyst forecasts for a profit. Following the result, the analysts have updated their earnings model, and it would be good to know whether they think there's been a strong change in the company's prospects, or if it's business as usual. So we gathered the latest post-earnings forecasts to see what estimates suggest is in store for next year.

View our latest analysis for AMC Networks

After the latest results, the consensus from AMC Networks' seven analysts is for revenues of US$2.32b in 2025, which would reflect a noticeable 4.0% decline in revenue compared to the last year of performance. AMC Networks is also expected to turn profitable, with statutory earnings of US$3.37 per share. In the lead-up to this report, the analysts had been modelling revenues of US$2.38b and earnings per share (EPS) of US$2.91 in 2025. While revenue forecasts have been revised downwards, the analysts look to have become more optimistic on the company's cost base, given the nice increase in to the earnings per share numbers.

The consensus has made no major changes to the price target of US$10.14, suggesting the forecast improvement in earnings is expected to offset the decline in revenues next year. 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 AMC Networks, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at US$15.00 and the most bearish at US$8.00 per share. 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.

Of course, another way to look at these forecasts is to place them into context against the industry itself. Over the past five years, revenues have declined around 2.6% annually. Worse, forecasts are essentially predicting the decline to accelerate, with the estimate for an annualised 4.0% decline in revenue until the end of 2025. Compare this against analyst estimates for companies in the broader industry, which suggest that revenues (in aggregate) are expected to grow 2.8% annually. So it's pretty clear that, while it does have declining revenues, the analysts also expect AMC Networks to suffer worse than the wider industry.

The Bottom Line

The most important thing here is that the analysts upgraded their earnings per share estimates, suggesting that there has been a clear increase in optimism towards AMC Networks following these results. On the negative side, they also downgraded their revenue estimates, and forecasts imply they will perform worse than the wider industry. Still, earnings per share are more important to value creation for shareholders. The consensus price target held steady at US$10.14, with the latest estimates not enough to have an impact on their price targets.

With that in mind, we wouldn't be too quick to come to a conclusion on AMC Networks. Long-term earnings power is much more important than next year's profits. We have forecasts for AMC Networks going out to 2027, and you can see them free on our platform here.

We don't want to rain on the parade too much, but we did also find 1 warning sign for AMC Networks that you need to be mindful of.

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