Here's What To Make Of Abiomed's (NASDAQ:ABMD) Decelerating Rates Of Return

If we want to find a potential multi-bagger, often there are underlying trends that can provide clues. 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. Ultimately, this demonstrates that it's a business that is reinvesting profits at increasing rates of return. So, when we ran our eye over Abiomed's (NASDAQ:ABMD) trend of ROCE, we liked what we saw.

Return On Capital Employed (ROCE): What is it?

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. To calculate this metric for Abiomed, this is the formula:

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

0.20 = US$265m ÷ (US$1.5b - US$113m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2021).

Thus, Abiomed has an ROCE of 20%. In absolute terms, that's a satisfactory return, but compared to the Medical Equipment industry average of 8.8% it's much better.

Check out our latest analysis for Abiomed

In the above chart we have measured Abiomed's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like, you can check out the forecasts from the analysts covering Abiomed here for free.

So How Is Abiomed's ROCE Trending?

While the current returns on capital are decent, they haven't changed much. The company has consistently earned 20% for the last five years, and the capital employed within the business has risen 248% in that time. Since 20% is a moderate ROCE though, it's good to see a business can continue to reinvest at these decent rates of return. Stable returns in this ballpark can be unexciting, but if they can be maintained over the long run, they often provide nice rewards to shareholders.

The Key Takeaway

To sum it up, Abiomed has simply been reinvesting capital steadily, at those decent rates of return. And long term investors would be thrilled with the 208% return they've received over the last five years. So even though the stock might be more "expensive" than it was before, we think the strong fundamentals warrant this stock for further research.

Abiomed could be trading at an attractive price in other respects, so you might find our free intrinsic value estimation on our platform quite valuable.

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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This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. 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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