What trends should we look for it we want to identify stocks that can multiply in value over the long term? In a perfect world, we'd like to see a company investing more capital into its business and ideally the returns earned from that capital are also increasing. Ultimately, this demonstrates that it's a business that is reinvesting profits at increasing rates of return. That's why when we briefly looked at ILPRA's (BIT:ILP) ROCE trend, we were pretty happy with what we saw.
Return On Capital Employed (ROCE): What is it?
For those that aren't sure what ROCE is, it measures the amount of pre-tax profits a company can generate from the capital employed in its business. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for ILPRA:
Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)
0.13 = €3.4m ÷ (€42m - €16m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2020).
Thus, ILPRA has an ROCE of 13%. On its own, that's a standard return, however it's much better than the 5.9% generated by the Machinery industry.
See our latest analysis for ILPRA
In the above chart we have measured ILPRA's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our free report on analyst forecasts for the company.
What The Trend Of ROCE Can Tell Us
While the current returns on capital are decent, they haven't changed much. The company has consistently earned 13% for the last three years, and the capital employed within the business has risen 62% in that time. Since 13% is a moderate ROCE though, it's good to see a business can continue to reinvest at these decent rates of return. Stable returns in this ballpark can be unexciting, but if they can be maintained over the long run, they often provide nice rewards to shareholders.
The Key Takeaway
To sum it up, ILPRA has simply been reinvesting capital steadily, at those decent rates of return. Despite the good fundamentals, total returns from the stock have been virtually flat over the last year. That's why we think it'd be worthwhile to look further into this stock given the fundamentals are appealing.
Since virtually every company faces some risks, it's worth knowing what they are, and we've spotted 3 warning signs for ILPRA (of which 2 are significant!) that you should know about.
While ILPRA may not currently earn the highest returns, we've compiled a list of companies that currently earn more than 25% return on equity. Check out this free list here.
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