We Like These Underlying Return On Capital Trends At Drillcon (STO:DRIL)

If you're looking for a multi-bagger, there's a few things to keep an eye out for. 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. With that in mind, we've noticed some promising trends at Drillcon (STO:DRIL) so let's look a bit deeper.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

Just to clarify if you're unsure, ROCE is a metric for evaluating how much pre-tax income (in percentage terms) a company earns on the capital invested in its business. The formula for this calculation on Drillcon is:

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

0.13 = kr27m ÷ (kr295m - kr86m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2020).

Therefore, Drillcon has an ROCE of 13%. On its own, that's a standard return, however it's much better than the 6.5% generated by the Metals and Mining industry.

Check out our latest analysis for Drillcon

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'd like to look at how Drillcon has performed in the past in other metrics, you can view this free graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow.

The Trend Of ROCE

Drillcon is showing promise given that its ROCE is trending up and to the right. Looking at the data, we can see that even though capital employed in the business has remained relatively flat, the ROCE generated has risen by 27% over the last five years. So our take on this is that the business has increased efficiencies to generate these higher returns, all the while not needing to make any additional investments. The company is doing well in that sense, and it's worth investigating what the management team has planned for long term growth prospects.

The Bottom Line

In summary, we're delighted to see that Drillcon has been able to increase efficiencies and earn higher rates of return on the same amount of capital. And with the stock having performed exceptionally well over the last five years, these patterns are being accounted for by investors. In light of that, we think it's worth looking further into this stock because if Drillcon can keep these trends up, it could have a bright future ahead.

On a separate note, we've found 2 warning signs for Drillcon you'll probably want to know about.

While Drillcon isn't earning the highest return, check out this free list of companies that are earning high returns on equity with solid balance sheets.

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