It's shaping up to be a tough period for The Beauty Health Company (NASDAQ:SKIN), which a week ago released some disappointing second-quarter results that could have a notable impact on how the market views the stock. It was a pretty negative result overall, with revenues of US$91m missing analyst predictions by 8.1%. Worse, the business reported a statutory loss of US$0.10 per share, much larger than the analysts had forecast prior to the result. 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. Readers will be glad to know we've aggregated the latest statutory forecasts to see whether the analysts have changed their mind on Beauty Health after the latest results.

View our latest analysis for Beauty Health

Taking into account the latest results, Beauty Health's twelve analysts currently expect revenues in 2024 to be US$367.0m, approximately in line with the last 12 months. The loss per share is expected to greatly reduce in the near future, narrowing 80% to US$0.13. Before this latest report, the consensus had been expecting revenues of US$391.8m and US$0.06 per share in losses. While this year's revenue estimates dropped there was also a very substantial increase in loss per share expectations, suggesting the consensus has a bit of a mixed view on the stock.

The consensus price target fell 22% to US$2.34, with the analysts clearly concerned about the company following the weaker revenue and earnings outlook. It could also be instructive to look at the range of analyst estimates, to evaluate how different the outlier opinions are from the mean. The most optimistic Beauty Health analyst has a price target of US$5.00 per share, while the most pessimistic values it at US$1.00. As you can see the range of estimates is wide, with the lowest valuation coming in at less than half the most bullish estimate, suggesting there are some strongly diverging views on how analysts think this business will perform. With this in mind, we wouldn't rely too heavily the consensus price target, as it is just an average and analysts clearly have some deeply divergent views on the business.

Taking a look at the bigger picture now, one of the ways we can understand these forecasts is to see how they compare to both past performance and industry growth estimates. We would highlight that Beauty Health's revenue growth is expected to slow, with the forecast 0.4% annualised growth rate until the end of 2024 being well below the historical 20% p.a. growth over the last three years. By way of comparison, the other companies in this industry with analyst coverage are forecast to grow their revenue at 6.3% per year. So it's pretty clear that, while revenue growth is expected to slow down, the wider industry is also expected to grow faster than Beauty Health.