Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd's (KLSE:KOSSAN) Stock Is Rallying But Financials Look Ambiguous: Will The Momentum Continue?

Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd (KLSE:KOSSAN) has had a great run on the share market with its stock up by a significant 21% over the last three months. However, we wonder if the company's inconsistent financials would have any adverse impact on the current share price momentum. In this article, we decided to focus on Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd's ROE.

Return on equity or ROE is a key measure used to assess how efficiently a company's management is utilizing the company's capital. In other words, it is a profitability ratio which measures the rate of return on the capital provided by the company's shareholders.

View our latest analysis for Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd

How Do You Calculate Return On Equity?

The formula for return on equity is:

Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) ÷ Shareholders' Equity

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd is:

1.8% = RM72m ÷ RM3.9b (Based on the trailing twelve months to March 2024).

The 'return' refers to a company's earnings over the last year. That means that for every MYR1 worth of shareholders' equity, the company generated MYR0.02 in profit.

Why Is ROE Important For Earnings Growth?

Thus far, we have learned that ROE measures how efficiently a company is generating its profits. Based on how much of its profits the company chooses to reinvest or "retain", we are then able to evaluate a company's future ability to generate profits. Assuming everything else remains unchanged, the higher the ROE and profit retention, the higher the growth rate of a company compared to companies that don't necessarily bear these characteristics.

Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd's Earnings Growth And 1.8% ROE

It is quite clear that Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd's ROE is rather low. Even compared to the average industry ROE of 8.6%, the company's ROE is quite dismal. Given the circumstances, the significant decline in net income by 6.5% seen by Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd over the last five years is not surprising. We believe that there also might be other aspects that are negatively influencing the company's earnings prospects. For instance, the company has a very high payout ratio, or is faced with competitive pressures.

So, as a next step, we compared Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd's performance against the industry and were disappointed to discover that while the company has been shrinking its earnings, the industry has been growing its earnings at a rate of 9.1% over the last few years.