Marrone Bio Innovations, Inc. (NASDAQ:MBII) missed earnings with its latest third-quarter results, disappointing overly-optimistic forecasters. Unfortunately, Marrone Bio Innovations delivered a serious earnings miss. Revenues of US$8.8m were 15% below expectations, and statutory losses ballooned 41% to US$0.04 per share. 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. With this in mind, we've gathered the latest statutory forecasts to see what the analysts are expecting for next year.

View our latest analysis for Marrone Bio Innovations

Taking into account the latest results, the current consensus from Marrone Bio Innovations' six analysts is for revenues of US$59.0m in 2021, which would reflect a substantial 58% increase on its sales over the past 12 months. The loss per share is expected to greatly reduce in the near future, narrowing 51% to US$0.088. Before this latest report, the consensus had been expecting revenues of US$60.6m and US$0.083 per share in losses. Overall it looks as though the analysts are negative in this update. Although sales forecasts held steady, the consensus also made a to its losses per share forecasts.

The average price target lifted 11% to US$1.98, clearly signalling that the weaker revenue and EPS outlook are not expected to weigh on the stock over the longer term. 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 Marrone Bio Innovations, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at US$2.50 and the most bearish at US$1.20 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.

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 clear from the latest estimates that Marrone Bio Innovations' rate of growth is expected to accelerate meaningfully, with the forecast 58% revenue growth noticeably faster than its historical growth of 26%p.a. over the past five years. Compare this with other companies in the same industry, which are forecast to grow their revenue 5.5% next year. It seems obvious that, while the growth outlook is brighter than the recent past, the analysts also expect Marrone Bio Innovations to grow faster than the wider industry.