Riverstone Holdings (SGX:AP4) has had a rough three months with its share price down 9.6%. It seems that the market might have completely ignored the positive aspects of the company's fundamentals and decided to weigh-in more on the negative aspects. Long-term fundamentals are usually what drive market outcomes, so it's worth paying close attention. Specifically, we decided to study Riverstone Holdings' ROE in this article.

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 short, ROE shows the profit each dollar generates with respect to its shareholder investments.

Check out our latest analysis for Riverstone Holdings

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How Is ROE Calculated?

The formula for return on equity is:

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

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Riverstone Holdings is:

18% = RM287m ÷ RM1.6b (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2024).

The 'return' is the amount earned after tax over the last twelve months. One way to conceptualize this is that for each SGD1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made SGD0.18 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. We now need to evaluate how much profit the company reinvests or "retains" for future growth which then gives us an idea about the growth potential of the company. Generally speaking, other things being equal, firms with a high return on equity and profit retention, have a higher growth rate than firms that don’t share these attributes.

Riverstone Holdings' Earnings Growth And 18% ROE

At first glance, Riverstone Holdings seems to have a decent ROE. Especially when compared to the industry average of 8.0% the company's ROE looks pretty impressive. As you might expect, the 16% net income decline reported by Riverstone Holdings is a bit of a surprise. Therefore, there might be some other aspects that could explain this. For example, it could be that the company has a high payout ratio or the business has allocated capital poorly, for instance.

So, as a next step, we compared Riverstone Holdings' performance against the industry and were disappointed to discover that while the company has been shrinking its earnings, the industry has been growing its earnings at a rate of 7.9% over the last few years.

SGX:AP4 Past Earnings Growth March 16th 2025

Earnings growth is a huge factor in stock valuation. 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 AP4 worth today? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether AP4 is currently mispriced by the market.

Is Riverstone Holdings Using Its Retained Earnings Effectively?

With a three-year median payout ratio as high as 118%,Riverstone Holdings' shrinking earnings don't come as a surprise as the company is paying a dividend which is beyond its means. Paying a dividend beyond their means is usually not viable over the long term.

In addition, Riverstone Holdings has been paying dividends over a period of at least ten years suggesting that keeping up dividend payments is way more important to the management even if it comes at the cost of business growth. Upon studying the latest analysts' consensus data, we found that the company's future payout ratio is expected to drop to 92% over the next three years. Regardless, the ROE is not expected to change much for the company despite the lower expected payout ratio.

Conclusion

In total, we're a bit ambivalent about Riverstone Holdings' performance. In spite of the high ROE, the company has failed to see growth in its earnings due to it paying out most of its profits as dividend, with almost nothing left to invest into its own business. With that said, we studied the latest analyst forecasts and found that while the company has shrunk its earnings in the past, analysts expect its earnings to grow in the future. Are these analysts expectations based on the broad expectations for the industry, or on the company's fundamentals? Click here to be taken to our analyst's forecasts page for the company.