Returns On Capital Are Showing Encouraging Signs At Liberty Latin America (NASDAQ:LILA)

If you're not sure where to start when looking for the next multi-bagger, there are a few key trends you should 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. Ultimately, this demonstrates that it's a business that is reinvesting profits at increasing rates of return. Speaking of which, we noticed some great changes in Liberty Latin America's (NASDAQ:LILA) returns on capital, so let's have a look.

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 Liberty Latin America, this is the formula:

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

0.06 = US$722m ÷ (US$15b - US$3.2b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to March 2022).

So, Liberty Latin America has an ROCE of 6.0%. Ultimately, that's a low return and it under-performs the Telecom industry average of 8.1%.

Check out our latest analysis for Liberty Latin America

roce

Above you can see how the current ROCE for Liberty Latin America compares to its prior returns on capital, but there's only so much you can tell from the past. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

What Does the ROCE Trend For Liberty Latin America Tell Us?

Liberty Latin America's ROCE growth is quite impressive. More specifically, while the company has kept capital employed relatively flat over the last five years, the ROCE has climbed 40% in that same time. 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. On that front, things are looking good so it's worth exploring what management has said about growth plans going forward.

On a side note, we noticed that the improvement in ROCE appears to be partly fueled by an increase in current liabilities. The current liabilities has increased to 21% of total assets, so the business is now more funded by the likes of its suppliers or short-term creditors. Keep an eye out for future increases because when the ratio of current liabilities to total assets gets particularly high, this can introduce some new risks for the business.

What We Can Learn From Liberty Latin America's ROCE

To bring it all together, Liberty Latin America has done well to increase the returns it's generating from its capital employed. And since the stock has fallen 57% over the last three years, there might be an opportunity here. So researching this company further and determining whether or not these trends will continue seems justified.

If you want to continue researching Liberty Latin America, you might be interested to know about the 2 warning signs that our analysis has discovered.

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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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.