SimCorp A/S' (CPH:SIM) Stock Been Rising: Are Strong Financials Guiding The Market?

SimCorp's (CPH:SIM) stock is up by 9.2% over the past three months. Since the market usually pay for a company’s long-term financial health, we decided to study the company’s fundamentals to see if they could be influencing the market. Specifically, we decided to study SimCorp's ROE in this article.

Return on Equity or ROE is a test of how effectively a company is growing its value and managing investors’ money. Simply put, it is used to assess the profitability of a company in relation to its equity capital.

See our latest analysis for SimCorp

How Is ROE Calculated?

Return on equity can be calculated by using the formula:

Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) ÷ Shareholders' Equity

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for SimCorp is:

30% = €70m ÷ €234m (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2020).

The 'return' is the yearly profit. Another way to think of that is that for every DKK1 worth of equity, the company was able to earn DKK0.30 in profit.

Why Is ROE Important For Earnings Growth?

We have already established that ROE serves as an efficient profit-generating gauge for a company's future earnings. Based on how much of its profits the company chooses to reinvest or "retain", we are then able to evaluate a company's future ability to generate profits. Generally speaking, other things being equal, firms with a high return on equity and profit retention, have a higher growth rate than firms that don’t share these attributes.

SimCorp's Earnings Growth And 30% ROE

To begin with, SimCorp has a pretty high ROE which is interesting. Second, a comparison with the average ROE reported by the industry of 13% also doesn't go unnoticed by us. Probably as a result of this, SimCorp was able to see a decent net income growth of 14% over the last five years.

As a next step, we compared SimCorp's net income growth with the industry and found that the company has a similar growth figure when compared with the industry average growth rate of 14% in the same period.

Earnings growth is an important metric to consider when valuing a stock. What investors need to determine next is if the expected earnings growth, or the lack of it, is already built into the share price. Doing so will help them establish if the stock's future looks promising or ominous. Is SimCorp fairly valued compared to other companies? These 3 valuation measures might help you decide.

Is SimCorp Making Efficient Use Of Its Profits?

SimCorp has a healthy combination of a moderate three-year median payout ratio of 46% (or a retention ratio of 54%) and a respectable amount of growth in earnings as we saw above, meaning that the company has been making efficient use of its profits.

Moreover, SimCorp is determined to keep sharing its profits with shareholders which we infer from its long history of paying a dividend for at least ten years. Upon studying the latest analysts' consensus data, we found that the company is expected to keep paying out approximately 42% of its profits over the next three years. As a result, SimCorp's ROE is not expected to change by much either, which we inferred from the analyst estimate of 27% for future ROE.

Summary

On the whole, we feel that SimCorp's performance has been quite good. Specifically, we like that the company is reinvesting a huge chunk of its profits at a high rate of return. This of course has caused the company to see substantial growth in its earnings. We also studied the latest analyst forecasts and found that the company's earnings growth is expected be similar to its current growth rate. To know more about the latest analysts predictions for the company, check out this visualization of analyst forecasts for the company.

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This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. 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. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
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