Today is shaping up negative for Adaptimmune Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ:ADAP) shareholders, with the analysts delivering a substantial negative revision to this year's forecasts. This report focused on revenue estimates, and it looks as though the consensus view of the business has become substantially more conservative. Surprisingly the share price has been buoyant, rising 26% to US$2.22 in the past 7 days. Whether the downgrade will have a negative impact on demand for shares is yet to be seen.

Following the downgrade, the current consensus from Adaptimmune Therapeutics' six analysts is for revenues of US$19m in 2022 which - if met - would reflect a major 64% increase on its sales over the past 12 months. Per-share losses are expected to creep up to US$1.13. Yet prior to the latest estimates, the analysts had been forecasting revenues of US$26m and losses of US$1.12 per share in 2022. 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 making no real change to the loss per share numbers.

View our latest analysis for Adaptimmune Therapeutics

One way to get more context on these forecasts is to look at how they compare to both past performance, and how other companies in the same industry are performing. For example, we noticed that Adaptimmune Therapeutics' rate of growth is expected to accelerate meaningfully, with revenues forecast to exhibit 169% growth to the end of 2022 on an annualised basis. That is well above its historical decline of 44% a year over the past five years. Compare this against analyst estimates for the broader industry, which suggest that (in aggregate) industry revenues are expected to grow 15% annually. So it looks like Adaptimmune Therapeutics is expected to grow faster than its competitors, at least for a while.

The Bottom Line

Unfortunately, analysts also downgraded their revenue estimates, although our data indicates revenues are expected to perform better than the wider market. Overall, given the drastic downgrade to this year's forecasts, we'd be feeling a little more wary of Adaptimmune Therapeutics going forwards.

There might be good reason for analyst bearishness towards Adaptimmune Therapeutics, like dilutive stock issuance over the past year. Learn more, and discover the 3 other flags we've identified, for 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 that insiders are buying.

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