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Business English vocabulary · Numbers and Money

Forecast

Meaning in business english, with examples

/ˈfɔːrkæst/nounCommon term

In business english, forecast means: A statement of what is expected to happen in the future, especially to sales, costs or demand, based on current data and trends.

In Turkish: tahmin, öngörü, projeksiyon

How it is used

Finance and sales teams prepare, revise and beat forecasts: 'sales forecast', 'We're ahead of forecast'. It is also a verb, and the past form is usually 'forecast': 'Sales are forecast to grow'.

Example sentences

  1. We've revised our sales forecast down because of weaker demand in Europe.

  2. The forecast for next quarter assumes no change in exchange rates.

Common collocations

  • sales forecast
  • revise the forecast
  • ahead of forecast
  • beat the forecast
  • forecast for next year
  • budgetThe amount of money that a company, team or project plans to spend over a period of time, or the plan that shows this.
  • estimateA careful guess at a number, cost or amount of time, based on the information you have; also a written statement of the likely price of a job.
  • quarterOne of the four three-month periods into which a company divides its financial year, often written Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4.
  • trendThe general direction in which something is changing or developing over time, such as sales, prices or customer behaviour.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Numbers and Money

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