Despite Its High P/E Ratio, Is Allied Motion Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:AMOT) Still Undervalued?
This article is for investors who would like to improve their understanding of price to earnings ratios (P/E ratios). To keep it practical, we’ll show how Allied Motion Technologies Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMOT) P/E ratio could help you assess the value on offer. Allied Motion Technologies has a P/E ratio of 29.96, based on the last twelve months. In other words, at today’s prices, investors are paying $29.96 for every $1 in prior year profit.
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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 Allied Motion Technologies:
P/E of 29.96 = $43.41 ÷ $1.45 (Based on the year to September 2018.)
Is A High Price-to-Earnings Ratio Good?
A higher P/E ratio implies that investors pay a higher price for the earning power of the business. That is not a good or a bad thing per se, but a high P/E does imply buyers are optimistic about the future.
How Growth Rates Impact P/E Ratios
When earnings fall, the ‘E’ decreases, over time. Therefore, even if you pay a low multiple of earnings now, that multiple will become higher in the future. Then, a higher P/E might scare off shareholders, pushing the share price down.
Allied Motion Technologies increased earnings per share by a whopping 49% last year. And it has bolstered its earnings per share by 6.0% per year over the last five years. So we’d generally expect it to have a relatively high P/E ratio. In contrast, EPS has decreased by 4.2%, annually, over 3 years.
How Does Allied Motion Technologies’s P/E Ratio Compare To Its Peers?
The P/E ratio indicates whether the market has higher or lower expectations of a company. As you can see below, Allied Motion Technologies has a higher P/E than the average company (15.5) in the electrical industry.
Allied Motion Technologies’s P/E tells us that market participants think the company will perform better than its industry peers, going forward. Shareholders are clearly optimistic, but the future is always uncertain. So investors should always consider the P/E ratio alongside other factors, such as whether company directors have been buying shares.
Don’t Forget: The P/E Does Not Account For Debt or Bank Deposits
Don’t forget that the P/E ratio considers market capitalization. In other words, it does not consider any debt or cash that the company may have on the balance sheet. In theory, a company can lower its future P/E ratio by using cash or debt to invest in growth.
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.
Allied Motion Technologies’s Balance Sheet
Net debt totals 12% of Allied Motion Technologies’s market cap. That’s enough debt to impact the P/E ratio a little; so keep it in mind if you’re comparing it to companies without debt.
The Verdict On Allied Motion Technologies’s P/E Ratio
Allied Motion Technologies’s P/E is 30 which is above average (17.1) in the US market. Its debt levels do not imperil its balance sheet and it has already proven it can grow. So it does not seem strange that the P/E is above average.
Investors should be looking to buy stocks that the market is wrong about. 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.’ So this free report on the analyst consensus forecasts could help you make a master move on this stock.
But note: Allied Motion Technologies may not be the best stock to buy. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with strong recent earnings growth (and a P/E ratio below 20).
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.
