If we want to find a stock that could multiply over the long term, what are the underlying trends we should look for? Amongst other things, we'll want to see two things; firstly, a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and secondly, an expansion in the company's amount of capital employed. This shows us that it's a compounding machine, able to continually reinvest its earnings back into the business and generate higher returns. With that in mind, the ROCE of EBOS Group (NZSE:EBO) looks decent, right now, so lets see what the trend of returns can tell us.

What Is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. The formula for this calculation on EBOS Group is:

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

0.13 = AU$483m ÷ (AU$6.7b - AU$3.1b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2024).

Therefore, EBOS Group has an ROCE of 13%. In absolute terms, that's a satisfactory return, but compared to the Healthcare industry average of 0.04% it's much better.

See our latest analysis for EBOS Group

In the above chart we have measured EBOS Group'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 EBOS Group .

The Trend Of ROCE

The trend of ROCE doesn't stand out much, but returns on a whole are decent. The company has consistently earned 13% for the last five years, and the capital employed within the business has risen 115% in that time. Since 13% is a moderate ROCE though, it's good to see a business can continue to reinvest at these decent rates of return. Stable returns in this ballpark can be unexciting, but if they can be maintained over the long run, they often provide nice rewards to shareholders.

On a separate but related note, it's important to know that EBOS Group has a current liabilities to total assets ratio of 46%, which we'd consider pretty high. This can bring about some risks because the company is basically operating with a rather large reliance on its suppliers or other sorts of short-term creditors. While it's not necessarily a bad thing, it can be beneficial if this ratio is lower.

The Bottom Line On EBOS Group's ROCE

To sum it up, EBOS Group has simply been reinvesting capital steadily, at those decent rates of return. And the stock has followed suit returning a meaningful 87% to shareholders over the last five years. So while investors seem to be recognizing these promising trends, we still believe the stock deserves further research.