Green Cross Holdings Corporation's (KRX:005250) Financials Are Too Obscure To Link With Current Share Price Momentum: What's In Store For the Stock?

Green Cross Holdings (KRX:005250) has had a great run on the share market with its stock up by a significant 37% over the last three months. However, we decided to pay attention to the company's fundamentals which don't appear to give a clear sign about the company's financial health. Specifically, we decided to study Green Cross Holdings' ROE in this article.

Return on equity or ROE is a key measure used to assess how efficiently a company's management is utilizing the company's capital. In other words, it is a profitability ratio which measures the rate of return on the capital provided by the company's shareholders.

View our latest analysis for Green Cross Holdings

How Is ROE Calculated?

The formula for ROE is:

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

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Green Cross Holdings is:

3.5% = ₩55b ÷ ₩1.6t (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2020).

The 'return' is the profit over the last twelve months. One way to conceptualize this is that for each ₩1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made ₩0.04 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. We now need to evaluate how much profit the company reinvests or "retains" for future growth which then gives us an idea about the growth potential of the company. Assuming everything else remains unchanged, the higher the ROE and profit retention, the higher the growth rate of a company compared to companies that don't necessarily bear these characteristics.

A Side By Side comparison of Green Cross Holdings' Earnings Growth And 3.5% ROE

As you can see, Green Cross Holdings' ROE looks pretty weak. Even when compared to the industry average of 5.9%, the ROE figure is pretty disappointing. Given the circumstances, the significant decline in net income by 23% seen by Green Cross Holdings over the last five years is not surprising. We believe that there also might be other aspects that are negatively influencing the company's earnings prospects. Such as - low earnings retention or poor allocation of capital.

So, as a next step, we compared Green Cross Holdings' performance against the industry and were disappointed to discover that while the company has been shrinking its earnings, the industry has been growing its earnings at a rate of 12% in the same period.

Earnings growth is an important metric to consider when valuing a stock. The investor should try to establish if the expected growth or decline in earnings, whichever the case may be, is priced in. Doing so will help them establish if the stock's future looks promising or ominous. If you're wondering about Green Cross Holdings''s valuation, check out this gauge of its price-to-earnings ratio, as compared to its industry.

Is Green Cross Holdings Using Its Retained Earnings Effectively?

Despite having a normal three-year median payout ratio of 36% (where it is retaining 64% of its profits), Green Cross Holdings has seen a decline 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, Green Cross Holdings only recently started paying a dividend so the management probably decided the shareholders prefer dividends even though earnings have been shrinking.

Summary

In total, we're a bit ambivalent about Green Cross Holdings' performance. While the company does have a high rate of reinvestment, the low ROE means that all that reinvestment is not reaping any benefit to its investors, and moreover, its having a negative impact on the earnings growth. Wrapping up, we would proceed with caution with this company and one way of doing that would be to look at the risk profile of the business. Our risks dashboard would have the 5 risks we have identified for Green Cross Holdings.

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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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