Did you know there are some financial metrics that can provide clues of a potential multi-bagger? Ideally, a business will show two trends; firstly a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and secondly, an increasing amount of capital employed. Ultimately, this demonstrates that it's a business that is reinvesting profits at increasing rates of return. Having said that, from a first glance at Hubify (ASX:HFY) we aren't jumping out of our chairs at how returns are trending, but let's have a deeper look.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

For those who don't know, ROCE is a measure of a company's yearly pre-tax profit (its return), relative to the capital employed in the business. To calculate this metric for Hubify, this is the formula:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.088 = AU$1.3m ÷ (AU$20m - AU$5.3m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2023).

So, Hubify has an ROCE of 8.8%. In absolute terms, that's a low return but it's around the Telecom industry average of 8.3%.

See our latest analysis for Hubify

While the past is not representative of the future, it can be helpful to know how a company has performed historically, which is why we have this chart above. If you're interested in investigating Hubify's past further, check out this free graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow.

What The Trend Of ROCE Can Tell Us

In terms of Hubify's historical ROCE movements, the trend isn't fantastic. Over the last four years, returns on capital have decreased to 8.8% from 43% four years ago. On the other hand, the company has been employing more capital without a corresponding improvement in sales in the last year, which could suggest these investments are longer term plays. It's worth keeping an eye on the company's earnings from here on to see if these investments do end up contributing to the bottom line.

On a related note, Hubify has decreased its current liabilities to 26% of total assets. That could partly explain why the ROCE has dropped. What's more, this can reduce some aspects of risk to the business because now the company's suppliers or short-term creditors are funding less of its operations. Some would claim this reduces the business' efficiency at generating ROCE since it is now funding more of the operations with its own money.

The Key Takeaway

Bringing it all together, while we're somewhat encouraged by Hubify's reinvestment in its own business, we're aware that returns are shrinking. And investors may be expecting the fundamentals to get a lot worse because the stock has crashed 76% over the last three years. On the whole, we aren't too inspired by the underlying trends and we think there may be better chances of finding a multi-bagger elsewhere.