What You Must Know About Enerplus Corporation’s (TSE:ERF) ROE
Enerplus Corporation (TSX:ERF) delivered an ROE of 14.80% over the past 12 months, which is an impressive feat relative to its industry average of 5.96% during the same period. While the impressive ratio tells us that ERF has made significant profits from little equity capital, ROE doesn’t tell us if ERF has borrowed debt to make this happen. We’ll take a closer look today at factors like financial leverage to determine whether ERF’s ROE is actually sustainable. Check out our latest analysis for Enerplus
Breaking down Return on Equity
Return on Equity (ROE) is a measure of Enerplus’s profit relative to its shareholders’ equity. It essentially shows how much the company can generate in earnings given the amount of equity it has raised. While a higher ROE is preferred in most cases, there are several other factors we should consider before drawing any conclusions.
Return on Equity = Net Profit ÷ Shareholders Equity
Returns are usually compared to costs to measure the efficiency of capital. Enerplus’s cost of equity is 11.36%. Given a positive discrepancy of 3.45% between return and cost, this indicates that Enerplus pays less for its capital than what it generates in return, which is a sign of capital efficiency. ROE can be broken down into three different ratios: net profit margin, asset turnover, and financial leverage. This is called the Dupont Formula:
Dupont Formula
ROE = profit margin × asset turnover × financial leverage
ROE = (annual net profit ÷ sales) × (sales ÷ assets) × (assets ÷ shareholders’ equity)
ROE = annual net profit ÷ shareholders’ equity
The first component is profit margin, which measures how much of sales is retained after the company pays for all its expenses. The other component, asset turnover, illustrates how much revenue Enerplus can make from its asset base. Finally, financial leverage will be our main focus today. It shows how much of assets are funded by equity and can show how sustainable the company’s capital structure is. Since ROE can be inflated by excessive debt, we need to examine Enerplus’s debt-to-equity level. Currently the debt-to-equity ratio stands at a low 42.00%, which means its above-average ROE is driven by its ability to grow its profit without a significant debt burden.
Next Steps:
While ROE is a relatively simple calculation, it can be broken down into different ratios, each telling a different story about the strengths and weaknesses of a company. Enerplus’s ROE is impressive relative to the industry average and also covers its cost of equity. Its high ROE is not likely to be driven by high debt. Therefore, investors may have more confidence in the sustainability of this level of returns going forward. Although ROE can be a useful metric, it is only a small part of diligent research.
For Enerplus, I’ve compiled three fundamental aspects you should look at:
Financial Health: Does it have a healthy balance sheet? Take a look at our free balance sheet analysis with six simple checks on key factors like leverage and risk.
Valuation: What is Enerplus worth today? Is the stock undervalued, even when its growth outlook is factored into its intrinsic value? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether Enerplus is currently mispriced by the market.
Other High-Growth Alternatives : Are there other high-growth stocks you could be holding instead of Enerplus? Explore our interactive list of stocks with large growth potential to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!
To help readers see pass 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.
