Did you know there are some financial metrics that can provide clues of a potential multi-bagger? 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. Basically this means that a company has profitable initiatives that it can continue to reinvest in, which is a trait of a compounding machine. With that in mind, we've noticed some promising trends at Queen's Road Capital Investment (TSE:QRC) so let's look a bit deeper.
Understanding 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. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for Queen's Road Capital Investment:
Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)
0.00006 = US$16k ÷ (US$234m - US$299k) (Based on the trailing twelve months to May 2022).
So, Queen's Road Capital Investment has an ROCE of 0.006%. In absolute terms, that's a low return and it also under-performs the Metals and Mining industry average of 4.0%.
View our latest analysis for Queen's Road Capital Investment
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're interested in investigating Queen's Road Capital Investment's past further, check out this free graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow.
What Does the ROCE Trend For Queen's Road Capital Investment Tell Us?
The fact that Queen's Road Capital Investment is now generating some pre-tax profits from its prior investments is very encouraging. The company was generating losses five years ago, but now it's earning 0.006% which is a sight for sore eyes. Not only that, but the company is utilizing 63,971% more capital than before, but that's to be expected from a company trying to break into profitability. This can tell us that the company has plenty of reinvestment opportunities that are able to generate higher returns.
In another part of our analysis, we noticed that the company's ratio of current liabilities to total assets decreased to 0.1%, which broadly means the business is relying less on its suppliers or short-term creditors to fund its operations. Therefore we can rest assured that the growth in ROCE is a result of the business' fundamental improvements, rather than a cooking class featuring this company's books.
The Bottom Line
Long story short, we're delighted to see that Queen's Road Capital Investment's reinvestment activities have paid off and the company is now profitable. And with the stock having performed exceptionally well over the last five years, these patterns are being accounted for by investors. In light of that, we think it's worth looking further into this stock because if Queen's Road Capital Investment can keep these trends up, it could have a bright future ahead.