Will Weakness in Balfour Beatty plc's (LON:BBY) Stock Prove Temporary Given Strong Fundamentals?

Simply Wall St · 09/15/2023 05:01

Balfour Beatty (LON:BBY) has had a rough three months with its share price down 4.0%. However, stock prices are usually driven by a company’s financial performance over the long term, which in this case looks quite promising. Particularly, we will be paying attention to Balfour Beatty's ROE today.

Return on equity or ROE is a key measure used to assess how efficiently a company's management is utilizing the company's capital. In other words, it is a profitability ratio which measures the rate of return on the capital provided by the company's shareholders.

See our latest analysis for Balfour Beatty

How To Calculate Return On Equity?

ROE can be calculated by using the formula:

Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) ÷ Shareholders' Equity

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Balfour Beatty is:

20% = UK£252m ÷ UK£1.2b (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2023).

The 'return' is the profit over the last twelve months. Another way to think of that is that for every £1 worth of equity, the company was able to earn £0.20 in profit.

Why Is ROE Important For Earnings Growth?

We have already established that ROE serves as an efficient profit-generating gauge for a company's future earnings. Depending on how much of these profits the company reinvests or "retains", and how effectively it does so, we are then able to assess a company’s earnings growth potential. Assuming everything else remains unchanged, the higher the ROE and profit retention, the higher the growth rate of a company compared to companies that don't necessarily bear these characteristics.

Balfour Beatty's Earnings Growth And 20% ROE

To start with, Balfour Beatty's ROE looks acceptable. Further, the company's ROE compares quite favorably to the industry average of 12%. Probably as a result of this, Balfour Beatty was able to see a decent growth of 13% over the last five years.

We then compared Balfour Beatty's net income growth with the industry and we're pleased to see that the company's growth figure is higher when compared with the industry which has a growth rate of 5.2% in the same 5-year period.

past-earnings-growth
LSE:BBY Past Earnings Growth September 15th 2023

The basis for attaching value to a company is, to a great extent, tied to its earnings growth. The investor should try to establish if the expected growth or decline in earnings, whichever the case may be, is priced in. This then helps them determine if the stock is placed for a bright or bleak future. What is BBY worth today? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether BBY is currently mispriced by the market.

Is Balfour Beatty Making Efficient Use Of Its Profits?

Balfour Beatty has a healthy combination of a moderate three-year median payout ratio of 33% (or a retention ratio of 67%) and a respectable amount of growth in earnings as we saw above, meaning that the company has been making efficient use of its profits.

Additionally, Balfour Beatty has paid dividends over a period of at least ten years which means that the company is pretty serious about sharing its profits with shareholders. Our latest analyst data shows that the future payout ratio of the company over the next three years is expected to be approximately 34%. Still, forecasts suggest that Balfour Beatty's future ROE will drop to 13% even though the the company's payout ratio is not expected to change by much.

Conclusion

On the whole, we feel that Balfour Beatty's performance has been quite good. Particularly, we like that the company is reinvesting heavily into its business, and at a high rate of return. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an impressive earnings growth. Having said that, on studying current analyst estimates, we were concerned to see that while the company has grown its earnings in the past, analysts expect its earnings to shrink in the future. To know more about the latest analysts predictions for the company, check out this visualization of analyst forecasts for the company.