A lackluster earnings announcement from Keppel Ltd. (SGX:BN4) last week didn't sink the stock price. However, we believe that investors should be aware of some underlying factors which may be of concern.

View our latest analysis for Keppel

SGX:BN4 Earnings and Revenue History February 11th 2025

How Do Unusual Items Influence Profit?

For anyone who wants to understand Keppel's profit beyond the statutory numbers, it's important to note that during the last twelve months statutory profit gained from S$408m worth of unusual items. While it's always nice to have higher profit, a large contribution from unusual items sometimes dampens our enthusiasm. We ran the numbers on most publicly listed companies worldwide, and it's very common for unusual items to be once-off in nature. And that's as you'd expect, given these boosts are described as 'unusual'. We can see that Keppel's positive unusual items were quite significant relative to its profit in the year to December 2024. As a result, we can surmise that the unusual items are making its statutory profit significantly stronger than it would otherwise be.

That might leave you wondering what analysts are forecasting in terms of future profitability. Luckily, you can click here to see an interactive graph depicting future profitability, based on their estimates.

Our Take On Keppel's Profit Performance

As previously mentioned, Keppel's large boost from unusual items won't be there indefinitely, so its statutory earnings are probably a poor guide to its underlying profitability. For this reason, we think that Keppel's statutory profits may be a bad guide to its underlying earnings power, and might give investors an overly positive impression of the company. In further bad news, its earnings per share decreased in the last year. The goal of this article has been to assess how well we can rely on the statutory earnings to reflect the company's potential, but there is plenty more to consider. If you'd like to know more about Keppel as a business, it's important to be aware of any risks it's facing. When we did our research, we found 3 warning signs for Keppel (1 is a bit concerning!) that we believe deserve your full attention.

Today we've zoomed in on a single data point to better understand the nature of Keppel's profit. But there are plenty of other ways to inform your opinion of a company. For example, many people consider a high return on equity as an indication of favorable business economics, while others like to 'follow the money' and search out stocks that insiders are buying. So you may wish to see this free collection of companies boasting high return on equity, or this list of stocks with high insider ownership.