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If you're looking for a multi-bagger, there's a few things to keep an eye out for. Firstly, we'd want to identify a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and then alongside that, an ever-increasing base 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. So when we looked at H C Slingsby (LON:SLNG) and its trend of ROCE, we really liked what we saw.
What Is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?
Just to clarify if you're unsure, ROCE is a metric for evaluating how much pre-tax income (in percentage terms) a company earns on the capital invested in its business. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for H C Slingsby:
Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)
0.044 = UK£453k ÷ (UK£16m - UK£5.5m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2022).
So, H C Slingsby has an ROCE of 4.4%. Ultimately, that's a low return and it under-performs the Trade Distributors industry average of 12%.
View our latest analysis for H C Slingsby
While the past is not representative of the future, it can be helpful to know how a company has performed historically, which is why we have this chart above. If you want to delve into the historical earnings, revenue and cash flow of H C Slingsby, check out these free graphs here.
How Are Returns Trending?
H C Slingsby has broken into the black (profitability) and we're sure it's a sight for sore eyes. The company now earns 4.4% on its capital, because five years ago it was incurring losses. Interestingly, the capital employed by the business has remained relatively flat, so these higher returns are either from prior investments paying off or increased efficiencies. So while we're happy that the business is more efficient, just keep in mind that could mean that going forward the business is lacking areas to invest internally for growth. After all, a company can only become a long term multi-bagger if it continually reinvests in itself at high rates of return.
Our Take On H C Slingsby's ROCE
To sum it up, H C Slingsby is collecting higher returns from the same amount of capital, and that's impressive. Since the stock has returned a staggering 170% to shareholders over the last five years, it looks like investors are recognizing these changes. With that being said, we still think the promising fundamentals mean the company deserves some further due diligence.
If you want to continue researching H C Slingsby, you might be interested to know about the 2 warning signs that our analysis has discovered.