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. 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, we've noticed some promising trends at Ansell (ASX:ANN) so let's look a bit deeper.

What Is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

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. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for Ansell:

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

0.11 = US$233m ÷ (US$2.6b - US$385m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2022).

Therefore, Ansell has an ROCE of 11%. In absolute terms, that's a pretty normal return, and it's somewhat close to the Medical Equipment industry average of 10%.

View our latest analysis for Ansell

In the above chart we have measured Ansell'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 Ansell here for free.

What Can We Tell From Ansell's ROCE Trend?

Ansell's ROCE growth is quite impressive. The figures show that over the last five years, ROCE has grown 42% whilst employing roughly the same amount of capital. 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. It's worth looking deeper into this though because while it's great that the business is more efficient, it might also mean that going forward the areas to invest internally for the organic growth are lacking.

The Bottom Line On Ansell's ROCE

In summary, we're delighted to see that Ansell has been able to increase efficiencies and earn higher rates of return on the same amount of capital. Investors may not be impressed by the favorable underlying trends yet because over the last five years the stock has only returned 10% to shareholders. So exploring more about this stock could uncover a good opportunity, if the valuation and other metrics stack up.

On a final note, we've found 1 warning sign for Ansell that we think you should be aware of.

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.