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When close to half the companies in the United States have price-to-earnings ratios (or "P/E's") below 14x, you may consider Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) as a stock to avoid entirely with its 44.2x P/E ratio. However, the P/E might be quite high for a reason and it requires further investigation to determine if it's justified.
Booking Holdings certainly has been doing a good job lately as it's been growing earnings more than most other companies. The P/E is probably high because investors think this strong earnings performance will continue. If not, then existing shareholders might be a little nervous about the viability of the share price.
Check out our latest analysis for Booking Holdings
If you'd like to see what analysts are forecasting going forward, you should check out our free report on Booking Holdings.
What Are Growth Metrics Telling Us About The High P/E?
There's an inherent assumption that a company should far outperform the market for P/E ratios like Booking Holdings' to be considered reasonable.
Taking a look back first, we see that the company grew earnings per share by an impressive 274% last year. Despite this strong recent growth, it's still struggling to catch up as its three-year EPS frustratingly shrank by 58% overall. Therefore, it's fair to say the earnings growth recently has been undesirable for the company.
Turning to the outlook, the next three years should generate growth of 60% per year as estimated by the analysts watching the company. Meanwhile, the rest of the market is forecast to only expand by 9.6% each year, which is noticeably less attractive.
With this information, we can see why Booking Holdings is trading at such a high P/E compared to the market. Apparently shareholders aren't keen to offload something that is potentially eyeing a more prosperous future.
The Key Takeaway
Generally, our preference is to limit the use of the price-to-earnings ratio to establishing what the market thinks about the overall health of a company.
As we suspected, our examination of Booking Holdings' analyst forecasts revealed that its superior earnings outlook is contributing to its high P/E. Right now shareholders are comfortable with the P/E as they are quite confident future earnings aren't under threat. Unless these conditions change, they will continue to provide strong support to the share price.
And what about other risks? Every company has them, and we've spotted 1 warning sign for Booking Holdings you should know about.
If you're unsure about the strength of Booking Holdings' business, why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals for some other companies you may have missed.