Is EBOS Group Limited's (NZSE:EBO) Recent Performance Tethered To Its Attractive Financial Prospects?

EBOS Group's (NZSE:EBO) stock is up by 9.8% over the past three months. Given its impressive performance, we decided to study the company's key financial indicators as a company's long-term fundamentals usually dictate market outcomes. Specifically, we decided to study EBOS Group's ROE in this article.

ROE or return on equity is a useful tool to assess how effectively a company can generate returns on the investment it received from its shareholders. Put another way, it reveals the company's success at turning shareholder investments into profits.

View our latest analysis for EBOS Group

How To 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 EBOS Group is:

13% = AU$173m ÷ AU$1.4b (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2020).

The 'return' is the amount earned after tax over the last twelve months. One way to conceptualize this is that for each NZ$1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made NZ$0.13 in profit.

What Has ROE Got To Do With Earnings Growth?

So far, we've learned that ROE is a measure of a company's profitability. 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 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.

EBOS Group's Earnings Growth And 13% ROE

To start with, EBOS Group's ROE looks acceptable. Further, the company's ROE is similar to the industry average of 13%. Consequently, this likely laid the ground for the decent growth of 8.0% seen over the past five years by EBOS Group.

Next, on comparing EBOS Group's net income growth with the industry, we found that the company's reported growth is similar to the industry average growth rate of 8.0% 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. Has the market priced in the future outlook for EBO? You can find out in our latest intrinsic value infographic research report.

Is EBOS Group Efficiently Re-investing Its Profits?

EBOS Group has a significant three-year median payout ratio of 73%, meaning that it is left with only 27% to reinvest into its business. This implies that the company has been able to achieve decent earnings growth despite returning most of its profits to shareholders.

Additionally, EBOS Group has paid dividends over a period of at least ten years which means that the company is pretty serious about sharing its profits with shareholders. Upon studying the latest analysts' consensus data, we found that the company is expected to keep paying out approximately 70% of its profits over the next three years. As a result, EBOS Group's ROE is not expected to change by much either, which we inferred from the analyst estimate of 15% for future ROE.

Conclusion

On the whole, we feel that EBOS Group's performance has been quite good. Especially the high ROE, Which has contributed to the impressive growth seen in earnings. Despite the company reinvesting only a small portion of its profits, it still has managed to grow its earnings so that is appreciable. We also studied the latest analyst forecasts and found that the company's earnings growth is expected be similar to its current growth rate. 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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