What Do The Returns On Capital At Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) Tell Us?

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. This shows us that it's a compounding machine, able to continually reinvest its earnings back into the business and generate higher returns. Having said that, from a first glance at Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) we aren't jumping out of our chairs at how returns are trending, but let's have a deeper look.

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

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for Duke Energy:

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

0.039 = US$5.6b ÷ (US$160b - US$17b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2020).

Thus, Duke Energy has an ROCE of 3.9%. On its own, that's a low figure but it's around the 4.6% average generated by the Electric Utilities industry.

Check out our latest analysis for Duke Energy

In the above chart we have measured Duke Energy's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

So How Is Duke Energy's ROCE Trending?

In terms of Duke Energy's historical ROCE movements, the trend isn't fantastic. To be more specific, ROCE has fallen from 4.9% over the last five years. Meanwhile, the business is utilizing more capital but this hasn't moved the needle much in terms of sales in the past 12 months, so this could reflect longer term investments. It's worth keeping an eye on the company's earnings from here on to see if these investments do end up contributing to the bottom line.

The Bottom Line On Duke Energy's ROCE

Bringing it all together, while we're somewhat encouraged by Duke Energy's reinvestment in its own business, we're aware that returns are shrinking. Although the market must be expecting these trends to improve because the stock has gained 58% over the last five years. Ultimately, if the underlying trends persist, we wouldn't hold our breath on it being a multi-bagger going forward.

One final note, you should learn about the 3 warning signs we've spotted with Duke Energy (including 1 which is shouldn't be ignored) .

If you want to search for solid companies with great earnings, check out this free list of companies with good balance sheets and impressive returns on equity.

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