This week, we will present you with a detailed series – decomposition of Return on Equity (ROE) of selected Croatian companies, using the 5-Step DuPont Analysis. DuPont analysis breaks down the underlying components of the ROE in order to analyze the contribution of each component. ROE is a measure of the profitability of a company in relation to equity. The higher the ROE a company achieves, the more efficient the company is in generating profits, using its equity to do so.
ROE – Croatian Blue Chips [FY 2023]
5-Step DuPont Analysis
When decomposed in the 5-step formula, ROE looks like this. If the same variable from the numerator and denominators is „cut out“, the aftermath would just be net profit divided by equity – which is in fact, nothing but ROE. Also, it should be noted that each component is the most useful when compared to companies within the same industry, as each industry has its own specific characteristics.
In other words, the company’s profitability ratio (ROE) is decomposed in five other ratios.
Operating margin gives us information on the company’s ability to generate profit from its operations and revenues. It calculates how much operating profit can a company make on a dollar of sales, after paying all costs of production (COGS, wages..), but before paying interest or tax. Overall, the operating margin represents the company’s operating efficiency.
Financial leverage divides a company’s total assets with a company’s equity, giving us information on how leveraged the company is with debt. Financial leverage can be useful as it emphasizes the financial stability of a company. Financial leverage equal to 1 would indicate that the company has no debt – that company financed its total assets with equity. The higher the financial leverage goes, the more leveraged the company.
Asset turnover compares a company’s assets to its sales. This ratio helps us to determine how efficiently a company uses its assets to generate revenue. This ratio is crucial as every company has to utilize its assets. The higher the ratio is, the more efficiently the company uses its assets to generate revenues. This means the company uses its equity and debt to produce higher revenues, compared to the company having a lower asset turnover ratio.
The last two components within DuPont are tax and interest burden. These components highlight how much do tax and interest weigh down a company’s net profitability. The tax burden gives us the proportion of profits retained after tax. This indicates how much does tax impacts on company’s bottom line. Interest burden tells us the extent to how much the interest expense of the company impacts its net profit.
Today, we will look at the Operating margin of a few Croatian Blue Chips, as a first DuPont component. Operating margin gives us insight into the company’s operating efficiency and ability to generate profit to equity from operating activities. The higher operating margin is a result of the company’s ability to generate more operating profit on each dollar of sales and it is a direct result of the company’s cost management efficiency. Looking at Podravka during 2023, operating profitability was stable as Podravka was able to mitigate the increase in the cost of production materials by improving production processes and procurement processes. Looking at Končar, Group improved op. profitability due to strong top line growth with overall strong 2023 for all KPIs.
Operating margin (%) – Croatian Blue Chips [FY 2023]
Tomorrow we will look into the second DuPont component of Croatian companies, Financial leverage, and compare them with peer companies operating within the same industry.
