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If we want to find a stock that could multiply over the long term, what are the underlying trends we should look 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. If you see this, it typically means it's a company with a great business model and plenty of profitable reinvestment opportunities. With that in mind, the ROCE of Accenture (NYSE:ACN) looks attractive right now, so lets see what the trend of returns can tell us.

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Return On Capital Employed (ROCE): What Is It?

For those who don't know, ROCE is a measure of a company's yearly pre-tax profit (its return), relative to the capital employed in the business. The formula for this calculation on Accenture is:

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

0.24 = US$10b ÷ (US$60b - US$17b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to February 2025).

Therefore, Accenture has an ROCE of 24%. That's a fantastic return and not only that, it outpaces the average of 9.4% earned by companies in a similar industry.

See our latest analysis for Accenture

In the above chart we have measured Accenture'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 analyst report for Accenture .

So How Is Accenture's ROCE Trending?

We'd be pretty happy with returns on capital like Accenture. The company has employed 91% more capital in the last five years, and the returns on that capital have remained stable at 24%. Now considering ROCE is an attractive 24%, this combination is actually pretty appealing because it means the business can consistently put money to work and generate these high returns. If these trends can continue, it wouldn't surprise us if the company became a multi-bagger.

In Conclusion...

In the end, the company has proven it can reinvest it's capital at high rates of returns, which you'll remember is a trait of a multi-bagger. And the stock has followed suit returning a meaningful 76% to shareholders 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.