The main point of investing for the long term is to make money. Better yet, you’d like to see the share price move up more than the market average. Unfortunately for shareholders, while the State Bank of India (NSE:SBIN) share price is up 63% in the last five years, that’s less than the market return. Zooming in, the stock is up just 2.6% in the last year.

Check out our latest analysis for State Bank of India

To quote Buffett, ‘Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace…’ One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.

State Bank of India’s earnings per share are down 57% per year, despite strong share price performance over five years. Essentially, it doesn’t seem likely that investors are focused on EPS. Because earnings per share don’t seem to match up with the share price, we’ll take a look at other metrics instead.

It is not great to see that revenue has dropped by 0.3% per year over five years. So it seems one might have to take closer look at earnings and revenue trends to see how they might influence the share price.

Depicted in the graphic below, you’ll see revenue and earnings over time. If you want more detail, you can click on the chart itself.

State Bank of India is a well known stock, with plenty of analyst coverage, suggesting some visibility into future growth. So it makes a lot of sense to check out what analysts think State Bank of India will earn in the future (free analyst consensus estimates)

A Dividend Lost

It’s important to keep in mind that we’ve been talking about the share price returns, which don’t include dividends, while the total shareholder return does. In some ways, TSR is a better measure of how well an investment has performed. Over the last 5 years, State Bank of India generated a TSR of 71%, which is, of course, better than the share price return. Although the company had to cut dividends, it has paid cash to shareholders in the past.

A Different Perspective

It’s good to see that State Bank of India has rewarded shareholders with a total shareholder return of 2.6% in the last twelve months. However, that falls short of the 11% TSR per annum it has made for shareholders, each year, over five years. Potential buyers might understandably feel they’ve missed the opportunity, but it’s always possible business is still firing on all cylinders. If you would like to research State Bank of India in more detail then you might want to take a look at whether insiders have been buying or selling shares in the company.