Yahoo Finance Is Class Limited's (ASX:CL1) Recent Stock Performance Influenced By Its Financials In Any Way?
Class' (ASX:CL1) stock is up by 2.7% over the past month. Given that stock prices are usually aligned with a company's financial performance in the long-term, we decided to investigate if the company's decent financials had a hand to play in the recent price move. Specifically, we decided to study Class' ROE in this article.
Return on equity or ROE is an important factor to be considered by a shareholder because it tells them how effectively their capital is being reinvested. Put another way, it reveals the company's success at turning shareholder investments into profits.
See our latest analysis for Class
How To Calculate Return On Equity?
The formula for ROE is:
Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) ÷ Shareholders' Equity
So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Class is:
16% = AU$7.0m ÷ AU$43m (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2020).
The 'return' is the profit over the last twelve months. One way to conceptualize this is that for each A$1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made A$0.16 in profit.
What Has ROE Got To Do With Earnings Growth?
Thus far, we have learned that ROE measures how efficiently a company is generating its profits. 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. Generally speaking, other things being equal, firms with a high return on equity and profit retention, have a higher growth rate than firms that don’t share these attributes.
Class' Earnings Growth And 16% ROE
To start with, Class' ROE looks acceptable. Further, the company's ROE is similar to the industry average of 15%. Consequently, this likely laid the ground for the decent growth of 6.1% seen over the past five years by Class.
We then compared Class' net income growth with the industry and found that the company's growth figure is lower than the average industry growth rate of 16% in the same period, which is a bit concerning.
Earnings growth is a huge factor in stock valuation. What investors need to determine next is if the expected earnings growth, or the lack of it, is already built into the share price. Doing so will help them establish if the stock's future looks promising or ominous. What is CL1 worth today? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether CL1 is currently mispriced by the market.
Is Class Efficiently Re-investing Its Profits?
The high three-year median payout ratio of 71% (or a retention ratio of 29%) for Class suggests that the company's growth wasn't really hampered despite it returning most of its income to its shareholders.
Additionally, Class has paid dividends over a period of five years which means that the company is pretty serious about sharing its profits with shareholders. Our latest analyst data shows that the future payout ratio of the company over the next three years is expected to be approximately 78%. As a result, Class' ROE is not expected to change by much either, which we inferred from the analyst estimate of 17% for future ROE.
Conclusion
Overall, we feel that Class certainly does have some positive factors to consider. Its earnings have grown respectably as we saw earlier, which was likely due to the company reinvesting its earnings at a pretty high rate of return. However, given the high ROE, we do think that the company is reinvesting a small portion of its profits. This could likely be preventing the company from growing to its full extent. Having said that, looking at the current analyst estimates, we found that the company's earnings are expected to gain momentum. To know more about the company's future earnings growth forecasts take a look at this free report on analyst forecasts for the company to find out more.
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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