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If you're looking for a multi-bagger, there's a few things to keep an eye out for. In a perfect world, we'd like to see a company investing more capital into its business and ideally the returns earned from that capital are also increasing. Ultimately, this demonstrates that it's a business that is reinvesting profits at increasing rates of return. In light of that, when we looked at Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG) and its ROCE trend, we weren't exactly thrilled.
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. To calculate this metric for Intuitive Surgical, this is the formula:
Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)
0.14 = US$1.7b ÷ (US$13b - US$1.2b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2022).
Thus, Intuitive Surgical has an ROCE of 14%. On its own, that's a standard return, however it's much better than the 11% generated by the Medical Equipment industry.
Check out our latest analysis for Intuitive Surgical
Above you can see how the current ROCE for Intuitive Surgical compares to its prior returns on capital, but there's only so much you can tell from the past. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our free report on analyst forecasts for the company.
How Are Returns Trending?
When we looked at the ROCE trend at Intuitive Surgical, we didn't gain much confidence. Around five years ago the returns on capital were 20%, but since then they've fallen to 14%. Although, given both revenue and the amount of assets employed in the business have increased, it could suggest the company is investing in growth, and the extra capital has led to a short-term reduction in ROCE. If these investments prove successful, this can bode very well for long term stock performance.
In Conclusion...
In summary, despite lower returns in the short term, we're encouraged to see that Intuitive Surgical is reinvesting for growth and has higher sales as a result. And long term investors must be optimistic going forward because the stock has returned a huge 115% to shareholders in the last five years. So while the underlying trends could already be accounted for by investors, we still think this stock is worth looking into further.
While Intuitive Surgical doesn't shine too bright in this respect, it's still worth seeing if the company is trading at attractive prices. You can find that out with our FREE intrinsic value estimation on our platform.