Is Ark Restaurants Corp.’s (NASDAQ:ARKR) P/E Ratio Really That Good?
The goal of this article is to teach you how to use price to earnings ratios (P/E ratios). We’ll show how you can use Ark Restaurants Corp.’s (NASDAQ:ARKR) P/E ratio to inform your assessment of the investment opportunity. Ark Restaurants has a price to earnings ratio of 13.68, based on the last twelve months. That is equivalent to an earnings yield of about 7.3%.
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How Do You Calculate A P/E Ratio?
The formula for price to earnings is:
Price to Earnings Ratio = Share Price ÷ Earnings per Share (EPS)
Or for Ark Restaurants:
P/E of 13.68 = $18.52 ÷ $1.35 (Based on the year to September 2018.)
Is A High Price-to-Earnings Ratio Good?
A higher P/E ratio means that investors are paying a higher price for each $1 of company earnings. That isn’t necessarily good or bad, but a high P/E implies relatively high expectations of what a company can achieve in the future.
How Growth Rates Impact P/E Ratios
If earnings fall then in the future the ‘E’ will be lower. Therefore, even if you pay a low multiple of earnings now, that multiple will become higher in the future. So while a stock may look cheap based on past earnings, it could be expensive based on future earnings.
It’s great to see that Ark Restaurants grew EPS by 15% in the last year. Unfortunately, earnings per share are down 1.7% a year, over 5 years.
How Does Ark Restaurants’s P/E Ratio Compare To Its Peers?
The P/E ratio indicates whether the market has higher or lower expectations of a company. If you look at the image below, you can see Ark Restaurants has a lower P/E than the average (17.2) in the hospitality industry classification.
This suggests that market participants think Ark Restaurants will underperform other companies in its industry. Many investors like to buy stocks when the market is pessimistic about their prospects. It is arguably worth checking if insiders are buying shares, because that might imply they believe the stock is undervalued.
A Limitation: P/E Ratios Ignore Debt and Cash In The Bank
It’s important to note that the P/E ratio considers the market capitalization, not the enterprise value. Thus, the metric does not reflect cash or debt held by the company. Hypothetically, a company could reduce its future P/E ratio by spending its cash (or taking on debt) to achieve higher earnings.
Such spending might be good or bad, overall, but the key point here is that you need to look at debt to understand the P/E ratio in context.
Is Debt Impacting Ark Restaurants’s P/E?
Net debt totals 25% of Ark Restaurants’s market cap. This is a reasonably significant level of debt — all else being equal you’d expect a much lower P/E than if it had net cash.
The Verdict On Ark Restaurants’s P/E Ratio
Ark Restaurants has a P/E of 13.7. That’s below the average in the US market, which is 17. The EPS growth last year was strong, and debt levels are quite reasonable. If it continues to grow, then the current low P/E may prove to be unjustified.
Investors have an opportunity when market expectations about a stock are wrong. As value investor Benjamin Graham famously said, ‘In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.’ Although we don’t have analyst forecasts, shareholders might want to examine this detailed historical graph of earnings, revenue and cash flow.
Of course you might be able to find a better stock than Ark Restaurants. So you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have grown earnings strongly.
To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
