If we want to find a stock that could multiply over the long term, what are the underlying trends we should look 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. Basically this means that a company has profitable initiatives that it can continue to reinvest in, which is a trait of a compounding machine. That's why when we briefly looked at WiseTech Global's (ASX:WTC) ROCE trend, we were pretty happy with what we saw.

Understanding 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 WiseTech Global, this is the formula:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.14 = AU$346m ÷ (AU$2.8b - AU$341m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2023).

Therefore, WiseTech Global has an ROCE of 14%. In absolute terms, that's a pretty normal return, and it's somewhat close to the Software industry average of 13%.

Check out our latest analysis for WiseTech Global

In the above chart we have measured WiseTech Global's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our free analyst report for WiseTech Global .

How Are Returns Trending?

While the returns on capital are good, they haven't moved much. Over the past five years, ROCE has remained relatively flat at around 14% and the business has deployed 288% more capital into its operations. Since 14% is a moderate ROCE though, it's good to see a business can continue to reinvest at these decent rates of return. Over long periods of time, returns like these might not be too exciting, but with consistency they can pay off in terms of share price returns.

The Bottom Line

In the end, WiseTech Global has proven its ability to adequately reinvest capital at good rates of return. And the stock has done incredibly well with a 313% return over the last five years, so long term investors are no doubt ecstatic with that result. So while investors seem to be recognizing these promising trends, we still believe the stock deserves further research.

While WiseTech Global 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 for WTC on our platform.