Industry-Leading Estimates Upgrade Stakeholder Reporting

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced an expected strengthening of airline industry profitability in an upgrade of its outlook for 2023.  With COVID-19 restrictions now removed in all major markets, the industry is expected to reach a high percentage of 2019 levels of revenue passenger miles (kilometers) for the year, with strengthening passenger traffic as the year progresses. That said, competition remains intense as carriers vie for consumer attention.

Members of the investor relations (IR) team at this large U.S. airline are responsible for articulating the company's story, financial performance and investment plans to key investors and other stakeholders. This involves looking at the company and its peer groups to report on growth trajectories, changes in market share and the impact of different pricing strategies. Members of the team wanted to improve access to important company and competitor metrics to sharpen their reports and presentations for the executives, investors and others.

Members of the IR team used consensus estimates to analyze their company’s performance, as well as that of their peers. However, they were relying on relationships with individual brokerage firms to access this information and had to comb through each firm's analysis to get the results they needed. They wanted easy access to more comprehensive data to reliably gauge market sentiment and how this might impact stakeholder views of the company and its competitors. In particular, they wanted:

• A standardized database of global, real-time financial forecasting measures, such as upgrades/downgrades, target price revisions and market-moving news.
• Ready information on means, medians, highs and lows for industry-specific metrics.
• The ability to analyze trends material to the airline industry and do a deep dive on evolving market expectations.

The IR team knew that S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intellignece") was well-known for its estimates data and reached out to learn more.

Market Intelligence specialists explained that S&P Capital IQ Estimates have been the go-to resource for years for reliable company analysis. They also described the recent global expansion of the dataset that has added 60+ industry-specific operating forecasts across 14 key sectors, including airlines. Available on the S&P Capital IQ Pro desktop platform, this data would give the IR team:

Explore some of the datasets mentioned in this case study.