Okay, but if someone is going to invest money into companies they need some way of deciding what they think a company is likely to do in the future.

Are these kinds of reports mostly a lot of window-dressing around a gut-feel about what might happen in the future? Yea, of course. But, there's not really other options. Pretty much all the other options for predicting how much money a particular company is going to make in the future will also boil down to a gut-feel.