Promisia Healthcare Limited (NZSE:PHL) shareholders that were waiting for something to happen have been dealt a blow with a 50% share price drop in the last month. Longer-term shareholders will rue the drop in the share price, since it's now virtually flat for the year after a promising few quarters.
Since its price has dipped substantially, given close to half the companies in New Zealand have price-to-earnings ratios (or "P/E's") above 17x, you may consider Promisia Healthcare as an attractive investment with its 9.1x P/E ratio. However, the P/E might be low for a reason and it requires further investigation to determine if it's justified.
Recent times have been quite advantageous for Promisia Healthcare as its earnings have been rising very briskly. One possibility is that the P/E is low because investors think this strong earnings growth might actually underperform the broader market in the near future. If you like the company, you'd be hoping this isn't the case so that you could potentially pick up some stock while it's out of favour.
View our latest analysis for Promisia Healthcare
Although there are no analyst estimates available for Promisia Healthcare, take a look at this free data-rich visualisation to see how the company stacks up on earnings, revenue and cash flow.
How Is Promisia Healthcare's Growth Trending?
In order to justify its P/E ratio, Promisia Healthcare would need to produce sluggish growth that's trailing the market.
Taking a look back first, we see that the company grew earnings per share by an impressive 134% last year. Still, EPS has barely risen at all from three years ago in total, which is not ideal. Therefore, it's fair to say that earnings growth has been inconsistent recently for the company.
Comparing that to the market, which is predicted to shrink 0.3% in the next 12 months, the company's positive momentum based on recent medium-term earnings results is a bright spot for the moment.
With this information, we find it very odd that Promisia Healthcare is trading at a P/E lower than the market. Apparently some shareholders believe the recent performance has exceeded its limits and have been accepting significantly lower selling prices.
The Key Takeaway
The softening of Promisia Healthcare's shares means its P/E is now sitting at a pretty low level. We'd say the price-to-earnings ratio's power isn't primarily as a valuation instrument but rather to gauge current investor sentiment and future expectations.
Our examination of Promisia Healthcare revealed its growing earnings over the medium-term aren't contributing to its P/E anywhere near as much as we would have predicted, given the market is set to shrink. There could be some major unobserved threats to earnings preventing the P/E ratio from matching this positive performance. One major risk is whether its earnings trajectory can keep outperforming under these tough market conditions. At least the risk of a price drop looks to be subdued, but investors think future earnings could see a lot of volatility.