Tag Archives: return on capital

return on equity vs. return on capital: why this matters today more than usual

May 7, 2020 By in return on equity, return on equity vs. return on capital, return on leverage, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

ROC vs. ROE

Let’s pretend we live in a world without taxes, just to make things simpler.

Year 1:  A start-up company raises $1,000,000 by issuing stock.  It uses the money to create a business that earns income of $100,000 a year.  Its return on equity = return on capital = 10%.  The firm reinvests all income into the business.

This is a pretty ho-hum business, returning 10% from operations.

Year 2:  Management then raises debt capital to supplement its equity by borrowing $900,000 from a bank at 5% interest.  It uses the extra funds to expand aggressively.

Let’s say it gets the same return as with its initial capital  Using the loan + retained profits from Year 1, it doubles the size of its business.  It earns $200,000 in income from operations  in Year 2 -$45,000 in interest expense = $155,000.

Its return on its total capital of $2 million, after deducting interest expense from operating income, drops, to 7.8%

Its return on equity of $1.1 million, however, rises,  to 14.1%.

The now financially-leveraged company posts 55% earnings growth, not 10%, and sports an above-average return on equity.

To the casual observer it now looks like a dynamo.   …but the transformation is all due to financial leverage.

Year 3:  Including income reinvested back into the business, the company now has $2,155,000 in capital, $1,255,000 of that in equity and $900,000 in debt.  It borrows another $900,000 on the same terms from its bank and puts that into the business.

The $3.055 million generates $305,500 in income from operations.  Interest on $1,800,000   @ 5% is $90,000.  Doing the subtraction, net earnings = $215,500.

Earnings growth is 39%+.  Return on equity is now 16%+.      Again, the difference between being the sleepy 10% grower and an apparent home run hitter is entirely due to management’s financial engineering.

 

What’s wrong with this picture?    In a bull market, nothing.  But the company has exposed itself to two financial risks if business slows.  Can it generate enough cash to pay the $90,000 in interest expense, which amounts to four months’ profits in good times but maybe ten months’ in bad?  Can the bank call part–or all–of the loan?  If so, how does our company get the money, which is the equivalent of nine years’ earnings?

 

stock buybacks:  more financial engineering

A second issue:  suppose the company employs another form of financial engineering and uses the money it borrows at the beginning of Year 3 to buy back stock rather than reinvest in the business.

Why do this?

…it doesn’t improve overall earnings, but boosts earnings per share.  Although framed in press releases as a “return” to shareholders, this also–one of my pet peeves–disguises/offsets the dilution of you and me as shareholders through the stock options management issues to itself.  (I’m not against stock options per se; I’m against the disguise.)  In this case, earnings are $215,500 before interest expense of $90,000.  Interest expense amounts to five months’ profits.  The loan principal is equal to 18 years’ earnings.

 

how/why does financial engineering like this happen?

When there’s lots of extra money sloshing around in the system, banks, the fixed income markets and companies do crazy things.  This was a potential worry several years ago.  Unfortunately, lacking understanding of how the economy or the financial system works, the Trump administration has made the problem worse through the tax and money policies it has pursued.  Instead of taking away the punch bowl, Trump has spiked it a lot more.

 

my take

For us as investors, the point of this post is to distinguish between companies that show high returns on equity because of the earning power of the company business (high returns on capital; these are keepers) from those where financial engineering is the main reason returns on equity are high (low returns on capital; riskier than they seem at first glance and likely to perform poorly in wobbly markets).

 

 

 

 

 

 

evaluating management: Donald Trump and real estate

July 21, 2017 By in return on equity, return on equity vs. return on capital, return on leverage, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

Last year Forbes published an analysis by James Elkins, a professor in the finance department at the University of Texas, that concludes Mr. Trump has underperformed the average real estate professional in the US by a whopping 57% over his career, despite the boost to returns he achieved by maintaining almost twice the average amount of financial leverage.

The results are highly tentative.  Prof. Elkins uses a REIT index as a proxy for overall real estate returns.  He also employs Mr. Trump’s statement of his starting net worth and the Forbes $4.5 billion estimate of his 2016 wealth (the 2017 estimate is $1 billion lower).

On the industry benchmark, my experience with real estate moguls, mostly outside the US, is that the returns on their private real estate investments are generally higher than those they achieve in their publicly traded vehicles.  In Mr. Trump’s case, his net worth also includes his considerable earnings as a reality show star, as well as the potentially positive effect of debt forgiveness through bankruptcies.

In short, the 14.4% annual return on equity Elkins uses for the industry is probably too low and the 12.5% return he figures for Trump is too high.

 

My question is what the returns on capital are in the Elkins example.

According to Elkins, REITs have an average debt to equity ratio of about 30%.  This means they have a mix of roughly three parts equity, one part debt.  Assume that their average cost of debt has been 8%–a figure that seems reasonable to me but which I’ve just plucked out of the air.  If so, their 14.4% return breaks out into roughly a 12.5% return on capital (actually operating real estate ventures) and 2% from using financial leverage.

This calculation implies that Mr. Trump’s 12.5% return breaks out to something like 9% from real estate and 3.5% from financial leverage.

At first glance, the difference between a 14.4% annual return and a 12.5% return doesn’t seem like much.  Prof. Elkins’ point is that over a career being a relative laggard adds up.  In this case, it translates into having $4.5 billion instead of $23 billion.  Mine is that the numbers flatter Mr. Trump’s planning and management skills, which fall even more deeply below the average in the real estate industry than his overall results.

(5/20/19. Note:  the consensus today is that Mr. Trump never had assets anywhere near the Forbes figure and that in real estate, he added no value–doing little more than preserve in real terms the capital he inherited from his family.  That is, the idea that he made a fifth of the return of the average real estate magnate–and perhaps a tenth of what the best did, is too generous.  He appears to have made nothing.  Even so, that’s without factoring in the personal lifeline he may have received from security holders of his ill-fated Atlantic City casinos.

Together with the tax returns published by the New York Times, the picture that emerges is of a brilliant self-marketer, who has been able to recast the reality of a singularly maladroit businessperson.  Again, even this assessment may prove too flattering, if there is any substance to the money laundering allegations that are now surfacing.

One more thing:  I’ve taken a second look at my return calculations and revised them slightly.  None of my conclusions change:  Mr. Trump’s performance comes out slightly worse than before.)

 

 

evaluating management: return on capital

July 19, 2017 By in return on equity, return on equity vs. return on capital, return on leverage, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

equity capital

Yesterday, I wrote about return on equity, as it applies to a company that uses only this form of capital, i.e., has no long-term borrowings, no financial leverage.

debt capital

In most places, companies are allowed to employ debt capital in their long-term operating plans as well as equity.

Opinions differ as to whether this is a good idea or not.  Americans tend to approve, on the idea that debt is a cheaper form of capital than equity; investors in the UK and Europe tend to disapprove–arguing that debt is a more expensive form of capital than equity.  In the Islamic world straight debt is not allowed.

My chief comment is old saw that “leverage works both ways;”  that is, during an economic expansion it’s most often a return booster, while in bad times it can be an albatross around the firm’s neck.

example

Let’s say a company goes public by selling 1000 shares at $10 each.

Once it’s public, it issues $10,000 worth of ten-year bonds with a 5% coupon.

Now it has $10,000 in equity and $10,000 in debt.

Let’s say it invests all the money in projects that produce a $2000 annual return. (For simplicity’s sake, let’s make the (unrealistic) assumption that the money is all raised and invested in projects that are instantly up and running on January 1st).  Let’s also ignore taxes.)

At the end of year 1, the firm has earned $2000.

return on capital

Its return on capital is:  $2000 ÷ ($10,000 debt + $10,000 equity = $20,000), or 10%.

return on equity

Its return on equity is:  ($2000 – $500 in interest = $1500) ÷ $10,000 equity  = 15%.

return on leverage

Let’s define another term, return on leverage, as the return on equity minus the return on capital.  In this case, the return (to equityholders) on (or from) leverage is +5%.

Why do so?   Why in the form of a simple subtraction?

As to the form, the sole reason is because it is a simple thing to figure out.

I think it’s important to break down the returns a management is producing for shareholders into two components to quqntify how good it is at two different management skills–how company operations are being run (return on capital) and how those returns are being supplemented by shrewd use of debt financing (return on leverage).

I say “supplemented” because in a well-managed business the lion’s share of the returns will come from operations.  Returns from leverage will be the icing on the cake.

Looked at in a different way, what conclusion should we draw if most of the returns come from leverage?  One worry is that the firm’s management doesn’t have the necessary operating skills to be successful and is substituting aggressive risk taking with company financing to cover up for this deficiency.

For example:

Suppose the company described above earns $1200 in year 1.

That’s a 6% return on capital.

The return on equity is ($1200 – $500) ÷ $10,000 = 7%.

The return on leverage = 1%!  This is trouble, because the company is barely covering the cost of its borrowing.

A worse case:

The company earns $400.

The return on capital is 2.5%.

The return on equity is ($400 -$500) ÷ $10,000 = -1%

The return on leverage is -1% -2.5% = -3.5%.  This is a disaster.

 

More tomorrow.

 

 

using book value as an analytic tool

April 18, 2016 By in book value, return on equity, return on equity vs. return on capital, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

historical cost

Generally speaking, all of a company’s balance sheet data are recorded at historical cost (adjustments for currency fluctuations for multinational firms are he only exception I can think of this early in the morning).

book value

If this accurately reflect’s today’s values, and sometimes this can be an IF, then

…book value is an accurate indicator of the market value of shareholders’ ownership interest in the firm.

asset value

That means that price/book (share price divided by book (shareholders equity) value per share) can be an indicator of over/undervaluation.  In particular, if a company’s shares are trading below book, then it could potentially be broken up and sold at a profit.

management skill

We can also use return on book value (yearly net profit divided by book value) as a way of assessing management’s skill in using the assets it controls to make money.  This can be a particularly useful shorthand in the case of, say, financial firms, which tend to have fingers in a lot of pies and to disclose little about many of them.

Notes:

–price/book is not a linear or symmetrical measure.

On the one hand, a basic tenet of value investing is that when the return on book is unusually low either the company’s board or third parties will force change.  So weak companies may trade at smaller discounts to book than one might think they deserve.

On the other, strong performing firms will likely trade at premiums to book.  However, the amount of the premium will depend both on the state of “animal spirits” and more sober judgments about the sustainability of above-average results.

—return on book vs. return on capital.  Return on capital is the same kind of ratio as return on book and has the same intent–to assess how well management is using the assets it is entrusted with.  The difference is that ROC factors in any long-term debt a company may have.

Return on capital is defined as:  (net profit + after-tax interest expense) divided by (long-term debt + shareholders equity).

Return on capital and return on book value are the same if a company has no long-term debt.  Return on capital is typically lower than return on book if a company has long-term borrowings, debt capital usually costs (a lot) less than equity capital.

using return on capital

ROC and the spread between ROC and ROB can be important.  We should think of ROC as the profitability of the business enterprise and the difference between it and ROB as the return on financial leverage.

For instance, for a given firm, the ROC may be 10% and the return on book (equity) 15%.  The difference, 5 percentage points, is the result of “financial engineering,” or the leveraged structure of the company.  Those figures may be ok (and, for the record, I’m not against leverage per se).  But if the ROC is 2% and the ROB is 12%, virtually all the profits of the firm come from financial leverage–not from the underlying business.  That’s a risky situation, in my view–one that owners should be aware of.

More tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

return on equity vs. return on capital: two important indicators

August 21, 2012 By in return on equity vs. return on capital Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

In a post a few days ago, I wrote about return on equity,  which is a standard measurement of the skill of the management of a company whose stock we might consider owning.  Services like Value Line provide statistical arrays for companies–and for the industries they’re a part of–that have these calculations,and a bunch of others, already done.

Today I want to add an important refinement–return on capital.

two forms of capital

Corporations have two sources of investment capital available to them.  One is equity, which is ownership interests in the firm that the corporation sells to shareholders.  The other is debt.  Debt comes is two flavors:  bonds issued by the company or bank loans that the firm takes out.

Debt holders have a call on corporate cash that’s superior to shareholders’.  On the other hand, as creditors, debtholders have no ownership rights. So, other than if the firm is in dire financial condition, they have no say over corporate operations.

Why take on debt?

It’s easier to raise capital this way, under normal circumstances.  Also, Americans, if no one else, believe that debt is a cheaper form of capital–meaning that shareholders can gain extra return by using it.

On the other hand, financial leverage (which is what having debt is typically called on Wall Street) brings risks with it.  So it’s important for investors to distinguish in a potential investment’s returns the portion that comes from employing capital in the company and the part that comes from using debt.

where return on capital comes in

Return on capital measures the first; return on equity measures the first plus the second.  Subtracting return on capital from return on equity gives return on financial leverage (a term I made up; the number doesn’t have a common name), or return from capital structure/financial engineering.

a simple example

1.  Let’s assume that a company has 100 units of equity and that it’s in a business where investing that 100 creates 100 units of annual sales (these numbers aren’t realistic; their virtue is simplicity).

Let’s also say that the company will earn 20 units of earnings before interest and taxes (ebit) from those sales.   We’ll also say that the company pays tax at 35%.

The income statement looks like this:

sales       100

ebit          20

tax at 35%    (7)

net income       13.

return on equity =   net income ÷ shareholders’ funds   =   13   ÷    100   =  13%.

2.  Same company, but it has borrowed 100 units of debt capital @ 5% interest.

sales       200

ebit          40

debt interest    (5)

tax at 35%        (12.25)

net income      22.75

return on equity  =  22.75  ÷  100    =    22.75%.

A huge difference!!

defining return on capital

return on capital  = (net income + aftertax cost of debt)   ÷  (total capital, i.e. equity + debt)

The aftertax cost of debt:  in the US, and in many other places, interest expense is deductible from otherwise taxable income.  The tax break is:  interest expense times the tax rate.  The aftertax cost of debt is:  interest expense – the tax break.

In our case, the aftertax cost of debt is 5 -1.75, or 3.25.   Return on capital = ( 22.75  + 3.25)  ÷  200 =   13%.

results

In this example, the unleveraged company earns a return of 13% on its invested capital.  This is the return that the company’s management can achieve from operating the business.  This may be good or it may be bad   …depending on the industry and the competition.

The leveraged company produces the same return from the business.  But it amplifies this by 9.75% by using a lot of debt capital.  (By the way, the tax system encourages this behavior by allowing a writeoff of interest costs as a business expense.)

The important thing to recognize is that leverage alters the risk profile of the business, in two ways:

–the principal amount of the debt must eventually be repaid.  If the debt is a bank loan, it could be subject to a repayment demand on extremely short notice, and

–a downturn in sales will squeeze profits for the leveraged company more than for the unleveraged, since the interest expense remains a constant.  In my experience, the negative effects of leverage working against you are much more severe than this simple example suggests.