If we want to find a potential multi-bagger, often there are underlying trends that can provide clues. 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. If you see this, it typically means it's a company with a great business model and plenty of profitable reinvestment opportunities. Although, when we looked at Microware Group (HKG:1985), it didn't seem to tick all of these boxes.

What Is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

For those that aren't sure what ROCE is, it measures the amount of pre-tax profits a company can generate from the capital employed in its business. The formula for this calculation on Microware Group is:

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

0.18 = HK$39m ÷ (HK$637m - HK$421m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2024).

So, Microware Group has an ROCE of 18%. In absolute terms, that's a satisfactory return, but compared to the IT industry average of 6.0% it's much better.

View our latest analysis for Microware Group

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 Microware Group's past further, check out this free graph covering Microware Group's past earnings, revenue and cash flow.

What Does the ROCE Trend For Microware Group Tell Us?

Things have been pretty stable at Microware Group, with its capital employed and returns on that capital staying somewhat the same for the last five years. This tells us the company isn't reinvesting in itself, so it's plausible that it's past the growth phase. With that in mind, unless investment picks up again in the future, we wouldn't expect Microware Group to be a multi-bagger going forward.

Another point to note, we noticed the company has increased current liabilities over the last five years. This is intriguing because if current liabilities hadn't increased to 66% of total assets, this reported ROCE would probably be less than18% because total capital employed would be higher.The 18% ROCE could be even lower if current liabilities weren't 66% of total assets, because the the formula would show a larger base of total capital employed. So with current liabilities at such high levels, this effectively means the likes of suppliers or short-term creditors are funding a meaningful part of the business, which in some instances can bring some risks.

The Key Takeaway

In summary, Microware Group isn't compounding its earnings but is generating stable returns on the same amount of capital employed. Yet to long term shareholders the stock has gifted them an incredible 231% return in the last five years, so the market appears to be rosy about its future. However, unless these underlying trends turn more positive, we wouldn't get our hopes up too high.

On a final note, we found 3 warning signs for Microware Group (2 are potentially serious) you should be aware of.

While Microware Group may not currently earn the highest returns, we've compiled a list of companies that currently earn more than 25% return on equity. Check out this free list here.

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