It's been a pretty great week for Iris Energy Limited (NASDAQ:IREN) shareholders, with its shares surging 15% to US$6.81 in the week since its latest interim results. Results overall weren't great; even though revenues of US$76m beat expectations by 14%, statutory losses ballooned to US$0.15 per share, substantially worse than the analysts had expected. 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. We thought readers would find it interesting to see the analysts latest (statutory) post-earnings forecasts for next year.

Check out our latest analysis for Iris Energy

Taking into account the latest results, the consensus forecast from Iris Energy's five analysts is for revenues of US$161.7m in 2024. This reflects a substantial 32% improvement in revenue compared to the last 12 months. Losses are predicted to fall substantially, shrinking 83% to US$0.033. Before this earnings announcement, the analysts had been modelling revenues of US$164.4m and losses of US$0.28 per share in 2024. While the revenue estimates were largely unchanged, sentiment seems to have improved, with the analysts upgrading their numbers and making a very promising decrease in losses per share in particular.

There's been no major changes to the consensus price target of US$10.07, suggesting that reduced loss estimates are not enough to have a long-term positive impact on the stock's valuation. Fixating on a single price target can be unwise though, since the consensus target is effectively the average of analyst price targets. As a result, some investors like to look at the range of estimates to see if there are any diverging opinions on the company's valuation. There are some variant perceptions on Iris Energy, with the most bullish analyst valuing it at US$18.50 and the most bearish at US$8.00 per share. So we wouldn't be assigning too much credibility to analyst price targets in this case, because there are clearly some widely different views on what kind of performance this business can generate. 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.

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. We can infer from the latest estimates that forecasts expect a continuation of Iris Energy'shistorical trends, as the 74% annualised revenue growth to the end of 2024 is roughly in line with the 75% annual growth over the past three years. By contrast, our data suggests that other companies (with analyst coverage) in a similar industry are forecast to see their revenues grow 13% per year. So although Iris Energy is expected to maintain its revenue growth rate, it's definitely expected to grow faster than the wider industry.