When close to half the companies in the United States have price-to-earnings ratios (or "P/E's") below 18x, you may consider Rollins, Inc. (NYSE:ROL) as a stock to avoid entirely with its 53.4x P/E ratio. However, the P/E might be quite high for a reason and it requires further investigation to determine if it's justified.

Recent times have been pleasing for Rollins as its earnings have risen in spite of the market's earnings going into reverse. The P/E is probably high because investors think the company will continue to navigate the broader market headwinds better than most. If not, then existing shareholders might be a little nervous about the viability of the share price.

Check out our latest analysis for Rollins

If you'd like to see what analysts are forecasting going forward, you should check out our free report on Rollins.

How Is Rollins' Growth Trending?

Rollins' P/E ratio would be typical for a company that's expected to deliver very strong growth, and importantly, perform much better than the market.

Retrospectively, the last year delivered an exceptional 19% gain to the company's bottom line. The strong recent performance means it was also able to grow EPS by 40% in total over the last three years. So we can start by confirming that the company has done a great job of growing earnings over that time.

Looking ahead now, EPS is anticipated to climb by 12% per year during the coming three years according to the ten analysts following the company. Meanwhile, the rest of the market is forecast to only expand by 10% per year, which is noticeably less attractive.

With this information, we can see why Rollins is trading at such a high P/E compared to the market. It seems most investors are expecting this strong future growth and are willing to pay more for the stock.

The Final Word

Generally, our preference is to limit the use of the price-to-earnings ratio to establishing what the market thinks about the overall health of a company.

We've established that Rollins maintains its high P/E on the strength of its forecast growth being higher than the wider market, as expected. At this stage investors feel the potential for a deterioration in earnings isn't great enough to justify a lower P/E ratio. It's hard to see the share price falling strongly in the near future under these circumstances.

The company's balance sheet is another key area for risk analysis. You can assess many of the main risks through our free balance sheet analysis for Rollins with six simple checks.

If P/E ratios interest you, you may wish to see this free collection of other companies with strong earnings growth and low P/E ratios.

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