Returns On Capital At KEL (TYO:6919) Have Stalled

Did you know there are some financial metrics that can provide clues of a potential multi-bagger? 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. Basically this means that a company has profitable initiatives that it can continue to reinvest in, which is a trait of a compounding machine. However, after investigating KEL (TYO:6919), we don't think it's current trends fit the mold of a multi-bagger.

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 KEL:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.079 = JP¥993m ÷ (JP¥15b - JP¥2.3b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2020).

Thus, KEL has an ROCE of 7.9%. On its own, that's a low figure but it's around the 7.3% average generated by the Electronic industry.

View our latest analysis for KEL

While the past is not representative of the future, it can be helpful to know how a company has performed historically, which is why we have this chart above. If you want to delve into the historical earnings, revenue and cash flow of KEL, check out these free graphs here.

The Trend Of ROCE

There hasn't been much to report for KEL's returns and its level of capital employed because both metrics have been steady for the past five years. Businesses with these traits tend to be mature and steady operations because they're past the growth phase. So unless we see a substantial change at KEL in terms of ROCE and additional investments being made, we wouldn't hold our breath on it being a multi-bagger.

In Conclusion...

In a nutshell, KEL has been trudging along with the same returns from the same amount of capital over the last five years. Although the market must be expecting these trends to improve because the stock has gained 67% over the last five years. However, unless these underlying trends turn more positive, we wouldn't get our hopes up too high.

If you want to continue researching KEL, you might be interested to know about the 1 warning sign that our analysis has discovered.

For those who like to invest in solid companies, check out this free list of companies with solid balance sheets and high returns on equity.

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