One of the best investments we can make is grindr not sending messagesin our own knowledge and skill set. With that in mind, this article will work through how we can use Return On Equity (ROE) to better understand a business. By way of learning-by-doing, we’ll look at ROE to gain a better understanding of Cineworld Group plc (

LON:CINE

).

Our data shows

Cineworld Group has a return on equity of 6.1%

for the last year. One way to conceptualize this, is that for each £1 of shareholders’ equity it has, the company made £0.061 in profit.

View our latest analysis for Cineworld Group

How Do I Calculate ROE?

The

formula for ROE

is:

Return on Equity = Net Profit ÷ Shareholders’ Equity

Or for Cineworld Group:

6.1% = 210.542203 ÷ US$3.4b (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2018.)

It’s easy to understand the ‘net profit’ part of that equation, but ‘shareholders’ equity’ requires further explanation. It is all earnings retained by the company, plus any capital paid in by shareholders. You can calculate shareholders’ equity by subtracting the company’s total liabilities from its total assets.

What Does ROE Signify?

ROE looks at the amount a company earns relative to the money it has kept within the business. The ‘return’ is the yearly profit. The higher the ROE, the more profit the company is making. So, as a general rule,

a high ROE is a good thing

. That means it can be interesting to compare the ROE of different companies.

Does Cineworld Group Have A Good ROE?

One simple way to determine if a company has a good return on equity is to compare it to the average for its industry. The limitation of this approach is that some companies are quite different from others, even within the same industry classification. If you look at the image below, you can see Cineworld Group has a similar ROE to the average in the Entertainment industry classification (6.5%).

LSE:CINE Last Perf January 1st 19

That’s neither particularly good, nor bad. ROE can give us a view about company quality, but many investors also look to other factors, such as whether there are insiders buying shares. For those who like to find

winning investments

this

free

list of growing companies with recent insider purchasing, could be just the ticket.

How Does Debt Impact Return On Equity?

Most companies need money — from somewhere — to grow their profits. The cash for investment can come from prior year profits (retained earnings), issuing new shares, or borrowing. In the first and second cases, the ROE will reflect this use of cash for investment in the business. In the latter case, the use of debt will improve the returns, but will not change the equity. In this manner the use of debt will boost ROE, even though the core economics of the business stay the same.

Story continues

Combining Cineworld Group’s Debt And Its 6.1% Return On Equity

Cineworld Group clearly uses a significant amount debt to boost returns, as it has a debt to equity ratio of 1.20. The company doesn’t have a bad ROE, but it is less than ideal tht it has had to use debt to achieve its returns. Debt increases risk and reduces options for the company in the future, so you generally want to see some good returns from using it.

But It’s Just One Metric

Return on equity is a useful indicator of the ability of a business to generate profits and return them to shareholders. In my book the highest quality companies have high return on equity, despite low debt. If two companies have around the same level of debt to equity, and one has a higher ROE, I’d generally prefer the one with higher ROE.

But when a business is high quality, the market often bids it up to a price that reflects this. The rate at which profits are likely to grow, relative to the expectations of profit growth reflected in the current price, must be considered, too. So you might want to check this FREE

visualization of analyst forecasts for the company

.

But note:

Cineworld Group may not be the best stock to buy

. So take a peek at this

free

list of interesting companies with high ROE and low debt.

To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.

The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at

[email protected]

.

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