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Porvair's (LON:PRV) stock up by 4.2% over the past week. Since the market usually pay for a company’s long-term financial health, we decided to study the company’s fundamentals to see if they could be influencing the market. In this article, we decided to focus on Porvair's ROE.
ROE or return on equity is a useful tool to assess how effectively a company can generate returns on the investment it received from its shareholders. 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 Porvair
How Do You Calculate Return On Equity?
The formula for ROE is:
Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) ÷ Shareholders' Equity
So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Porvair is:
11% = UK£15m ÷ UK£147m (Based on the trailing twelve months to May 2024).
The 'return' is the profit over the last twelve months. One way to conceptualize this is that for each £1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made £0.11 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. Depending on how much of these profits the company reinvests or "retains", and how effectively it does so, we are then able to assess a company’s earnings growth potential. 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.
Porvair's Earnings Growth And 11% ROE
To start with, Porvair's ROE looks acceptable. Yet, the fact that the company's ROE is lower than the industry average of 13% does temper our expectations. However, the moderate 11% net income growth seen by Porvair over the past five years is definitely a positive. So, there might be other aspects that are positively influencing earnings growth. For example, it is possible that the company's management has made some good strategic decisions, or that the company has a low payout ratio. However, not to forget, the company does have a decent ROE to begin with, just that it is lower than the industry average. So this also does lend some color to the fairly high earnings growth seen by the company.
Next, on comparing with the industry net income growth, we found that Porvair's growth is quite high when compared to the industry average growth of 9.3% in the same period, which is great to see.
Earnings growth is a huge factor in stock valuation. The investor should try to establish if the expected growth or decline in earnings, whichever the case may be, is priced in. Doing so will help them establish if the stock's future looks promising or ominous. One good indicator of expected earnings growth is the P/E ratio which determines the price the market is willing to pay for a stock based on its earnings prospects. So, you may want to check if Porvair is trading on a high P/E or a low P/E, relative to its industry.