Will Eastern Media International's (TPE:2614) Growth In ROCE Persist?

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. So on that note, Eastern Media International (TPE:2614) looks quite promising in regards to its trends of return on capital.

What is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. To calculate this metric for Eastern Media International, this is the formula:

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

0.0039 = NT$52m ÷ (NT$16b - NT$2.4b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2020).

So, Eastern Media International has an ROCE of 0.4%. In absolute terms, that's a low return and it also under-performs the Online Retail industry average of 8.0%.

View our latest analysis for Eastern Media International

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 Eastern Media International has performed in the past in other metrics, you can view this free graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow.

What Does the ROCE Trend For Eastern Media International Tell Us?

Eastern Media International has broken into the black (profitability) and we're sure it's a sight for sore eyes. The company was generating losses five years ago, but has managed to turn it around and as we saw earlier is now earning 0.4%, which is always encouraging. On top of that, what's interesting is that the amount of capital being employed has remained steady, so the business hasn't needed to put any additional money to work to generate these higher returns. That being said, while an increase in efficiency is no doubt appealing, it'd be helpful to know if the company does have any investment plans going forward. After all, a company can only become a long term multi-bagger if it continually reinvests in itself at high rates of return.

In another part of our analysis, we noticed that the company's ratio of current liabilities to total assets decreased to 15%, which broadly means the business is relying less on its suppliers or short-term creditors to fund its operations. This tells us that Eastern Media International has grown its returns without a reliance on increasing their current liabilities, which we're very happy with.

In Conclusion...

To bring it all together, Eastern Media International has done well to increase the returns it's generating from its capital employed. And a remarkable 172% total return over the last five years tells us that investors are expecting more good things to come in the future. So given the stock has proven it has promising trends, it's worth researching the company further to see if these trends are likely to persist.

If you'd like to know about the risks facing Eastern Media International, we've discovered 2 warning signs that you should be aware of.

While Eastern Media International 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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