Should We Be Excited About The Trends Of Returns At MEDNAX (NYSE:MD)?
If you're looking for a multi-bagger, there's a few things to keep an eye out 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. Although, when we looked at MEDNAX (NYSE:MD), it didn't seem to tick all of these boxes.
What is 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. The formula for this calculation on MEDNAX is:
Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)
0.12 = US$358m ÷ (US$3.4b - US$384m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2020).
Thus, MEDNAX has an ROCE of 12%. On its own, that's a standard return, however it's much better than the 8.8% generated by the Healthcare industry.
View our latest analysis for MEDNAX
In the above chart we have a measured MEDNAX'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 report on analyst forecasts for the company.
What Can We Tell From MEDNAX's ROCE Trend?
We're a bit concerned with the trends, because the business is applying 24% less capital than it was five years ago and returns on that capital have stayed flat. To us that doesn't look like a multi-bagger because the company appears to be selling assets and it's returns aren't increasing. You could assume that if this continues, the business will be smaller in a few year time, so probably not a multi-bagger.
What We Can Learn From MEDNAX's ROCE
In summary, MEDNAX isn't reinvesting funds back into the business and returns aren't growing. It seems that investors have little hope of these trends getting any better and that may have partly contributed to the stock collapsing 75% in the last five years. On the whole, we aren't too inspired by the underlying trends and we think there may be better chances of finding a multi-bagger elsewhere.
MEDNAX does come with some risks though, we found 2 warning signs in our investment analysis, and 1 of those is potentially serious...
If you want to search for solid companies with great earnings, check out this free list of companies with good balance sheets and impressive returns on equity.
This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
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