Understanding Your Return On Investment In Vereinigte Filzfabriken AG (MUN:VFF)

This article is intended for those of you who are at the beginning of your investing journey and want to better understand how you can grow your money by investing in Vereinigte Filzfabriken AG (MUN:VFF).

If you purchase a VFF share you are effectively becoming a partner with many other shareholders. Owing to this, it is important that the underlying business is producing a sufficient amount of income from the capital invested by stockholders. This is because the actual cash flow generated by the business dictates the potential for income (dividends) and capital appreciation (price increases), which are the two ways to achieve positive returns when buying a stock. Therefore, looking at how efficiently Vereinigte Filzfabriken is able to use capital to create earnings will help us understand your potential return. Investors use many different metrics but the analysis below focuses on return on capital employed (ROCE). Let’s take a look at what it can tell us.

View our latest analysis for Vereinigte Filzfabriken

ROCE: Explanation and Calculation

When you choose to invest in a company, there is an opportunity cost because that money could’ve been invested elsewhere. The cost of missing out on another opportunity comes in the form of the potential long term gain you could've received, which is dependent on the gap between the return on capital you could've achieved and that of the company you invested in. Hence, capital returns are very important, and should be examined before you invest in conjunction with a certain benchmark that represents the minimum return you require to be compensated for the risk of missing out on other potentially lucrative investments. A good metric to use is return on capital employed (ROCE), which helps us gauge how much income can be created from the funds needed to operate the business. This metric will tell us if Vereinigte Filzfabriken is good at growing investor capital. VFF’s ROCE is calculated below:

The calculation above shows that VFF’s earnings were 13% of capital employed. A good ROCE hurdle you should aim for in your investments is 15%, which VFF has just fallen short of, meaning the company creates an unideal amount of earnings from capital employed.

Then why have investors invested?

The underperforming ROCE is not ideal for Vereinigte Filzfabriken investors if the company is unable to turn things around. But if the underlying variables (earnings and capital employed) improve, VFF's ROCE may increase, in which case your portfolio could benefit from holding the company. So it is important for investors to understand what is going on under the hood and look at how these variables have been behaving. Looking at the past 3 year period shows us that VFF weakened investor return on capital employed from 29%. The movement in the earnings variable over this time shows a fall from €1.0m to €597k whilst capital employed has increased due to an increase in total assets employed , which means the company's ROCE has shrunk as a result of falling earnings and simultaneous increases in capital requirements.

Next Steps

Vereinigte Filzfabriken’s ROCE has decreased in the recent past and is currently at a level that makes us question whether the company is capable of providing a suitable return on investment. However, it is important to know that ROCE does not dictate returns alone, so you need to consider other fundamentals in the business such as future prospects and valuation. Vereinigte Filzfabriken's fundamentals can be explored with the links I've provided below if you are interested, otherwise you can start looking at other high-performing stocks.

1. Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for VFF’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for VFF’s outlook.
2. Valuation: What is VFF worth today? Despite the unattractive ROCE, is the outlook correctly factored in to the price? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether VFF is currently undervalued by the market.
3. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.

To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.

The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.

Simply Wall St analyst Simply Wall St and Simply Wall St have no position in any of the companies mentioned. This article is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material.