Groupe Guillin S.A.'s (EPA:ALGIL) Fundamentals Look Pretty Strong: Could The Market Be Wrong About The Stock?

Groupe Guillin (EPA:ALGIL) has had a rough month with its share price down 3.7%. But if you pay close attention, you might find that its key financial indicators look quite decent, which could mean that the stock could potentially rise in the long-term given how markets usually reward more resilient long-term fundamentals. In this article, we decided to focus on Groupe Guillin's ROE.

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.

View our latest analysis for Groupe Guillin

How Do You Calculate Return On Equity?

The formula for return on equity is:

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

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Groupe Guillin is:

13% = €52m ÷ €406m (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2020).

The 'return' refers to a company's earnings over the last year. Another way to think of that is that for every €1 worth of equity, the company was able to earn €0.13 in profit.

What Has ROE Got To Do With 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. Assuming all else is equal, companies that have both a higher return on equity and higher profit retention are usually the ones that have a higher growth rate when compared to companies that don't have the same features.

A Side By Side comparison of Groupe Guillin's Earnings Growth And 13% ROE

To start with, Groupe Guillin's ROE looks acceptable. On comparing with the average industry ROE of 9.3% the company's ROE looks pretty remarkable. However, we are curious as to how the high returns still resulted in flat growth for Groupe Guillin in the past five years. Based on this, we feel that there might be other reasons which haven't been discussed so far in this article that could be hampering the company's growth. These include low earnings retention or poor allocation of capital.

As a next step, we compared Groupe Guillin's net income growth with the industry and were disappointed to see that the company's growth is lower than the industry average growth of 4.4% in the same period.

The basis for attaching value to a company is, to a great extent, tied to its earnings growth. The investor should try to establish if the expected growth or decline in earnings, whichever the case may be, is priced in. By doing so, they will have an idea if the stock is headed into clear blue waters or if swampy waters await. What is ALGIL worth today? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether ALGIL is currently mispriced by the market.

Is Groupe Guillin Using Its Retained Earnings Effectively?

Despite having a normal three-year median payout ratio of 27% (implying that the company keeps 73% of its income) over the last three years, Groupe Guillin has seen a negligible amount of growth in earnings as we saw above. So there might be other factors at play here which could potentially be hampering growth. For example, the business has faced some headwinds.

In addition, Groupe Guillin has been paying dividends over a period of at least ten years suggesting that keeping up dividend payments is way more important to the management even if it comes at the cost of business growth. Our latest analyst data shows that the future payout ratio of the company is expected to rise to 53% over the next three years. Consequently, the higher expected payout ratio explains the decline in the company's expected ROE (to 9.6%) over the same period.

Summary

Overall, we feel that Groupe Guillin certainly does have some positive factors to consider. However, given the high ROE and high profit retention, we would expect the company to be delivering strong earnings growth, but that isn't the case here. This suggests that there might be some external threat to the business, that's hampering its growth. That being so, according to the latest industry analyst forecasts, the company's earnings are expected to shrink in the future. 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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