If we want to find a potential multi-bagger, often there are underlying trends that can provide clues. Amongst other things, we'll want to see two things; firstly, a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and secondly, an expansion in the company's amount of capital employed. If you see this, it typically means it's a company with a great business model and plenty of profitable reinvestment opportunities. Although, when we looked at BAIC Motor (HKG:1958), it didn't seem to tick all of these boxes.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. The formula for this calculation on BAIC Motor is:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.19 = CN¥18b ÷ (CN¥172b - CN¥78b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2024).

So, BAIC Motor has an ROCE of 19%. In absolute terms, that's a satisfactory return, but compared to the Auto industry average of 12% it's much better.

Check out our latest analysis for BAIC Motor

In the above chart we have measured BAIC Motor's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like to see what analysts are forecasting going forward, you should check out our free analyst report for BAIC Motor .

How Are Returns Trending?

There hasn't been much to report for BAIC Motor's returns and its level of capital employed because both metrics have been steady for the past five years. It's not uncommon to see this when looking at a mature and stable business that isn't re-investing its earnings because it has likely passed that phase of the business cycle. So unless we see a substantial change at BAIC Motor in terms of ROCE and additional investments being made, we wouldn't hold our breath on it being a multi-bagger. This probably explains why BAIC Motor is paying out 34% of its income to shareholders in the form of dividends. Unless businesses have highly compelling growth opportunities, they'll typically return some money to shareholders.

On a separate but related note, it's important to know that BAIC Motor has a current liabilities to total assets ratio of 45%, which we'd consider pretty high. This can bring about some risks because the company is basically operating with a rather large reliance on its suppliers or other sorts of short-term creditors. Ideally we'd like to see this reduce as that would mean fewer obligations bearing risks.

In Conclusion...

We can conclude that in regards to BAIC Motor's returns on capital employed and the trends, there isn't much change to report on. Since the stock has declined 11% over the last five years, investors may not be too optimistic on this trend improving either. 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.

BAIC Motor does have some risks though, and we've spotted 2 warning signs for BAIC Motor that you might be interested in.

While BAIC Motor may not currently earn the highest returns, we've compiled a list of companies that currently earn more than 25% return on equity. Check out this free list here.

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