What Should You Know About Karelia Tobacco Company Inc's (ATH:KARE) Capital Returns?

The content of this article will benefit those of you who are starting to educate yourself about investing in the stock market and want a simplistic look at the return on Karelia Tobacco Company Inc (ATH:KARE) stock.

Karelia Tobacco Company stock represents an ownership share in the company. Owing to this, it is important that the underlying business is producing a sufficient amount of income from the capital invested by stockholders. You need to pay attention to this because your return on investment is linked to dividends and internal investments to improve the business, which can only occur if the company is expected to produce adequate earnings with the capital that has been provided. Thus, to understand how your money can grow by investing in Karelia Tobacco Company, you need to look at what the company returns to owners for the use of their capital, which can be done in many ways but today we will use return on capital employed (ROCE).

View our latest analysis for Karelia Tobacco Company

What is Return on Capital Employed (ROCE)?

You only have a finite amount of capital to invest, so there are only so many companies that you can add to your portfolio. Accordingly, before you invest you need to assess the capital returns that the company has produced with reference to a certain benchmark to ensure that you are confident in the business' ability to grow your capital at a level that grants an investment over other companies. We'll look at Karelia Tobacco Company’s returns by computing return on capital employed, which will tell us what the company can generate from the money spent in operations. KARE’s ROCE is calculated below:

The calculation above shows that KARE’s earnings were 17% of capital employed. A good ROCE hurdle you should aim for in your investments is 15%, which is exceeded by KARE and means the company creates a solid amount of earnings on capital employed. If this can be sustained with good reinvestment opportunities or dividend distributions your capital has the potential to compound over time.

A deeper look

KARE is efficient with the use of capital, but this is only the case if KARE continues to maintain the presently healthy ROCE, which will change if the company either earns less or requires more capital to create earnings. So it is important for investors to understand what is going on under the hood and look at how these variables have been behaving. If you go back three years, you'll find that KARE’s ROCE has decreased from 25%. With this, the current earnings of €79m actually declined from €83m whilst capital employed has increased due to a hike in the level of 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

Although Karelia Tobacco Company’s ROCE has decreased over the past few years, the company still remains an attractive candidate that is capable of producing solid capital returns and a potentially strong return on investment. Before making any decisions, ROCE does not tell the whole picture so you need to pay attention to other fundamentals like future prospects and valuation. It's important to account for these factors because you cannot be sure if the downward path is a signal to run, or just a blip in an otherwise solid return profile. Karelia Tobacco Company'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 KARE’s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for KARE’s outlook.
2. Valuation: What is KARE worth today? Is the stock undervalued, even if its ROCE is factored into its intrinsic value? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether KARE is currently mispriced 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.