January 15, 2023 - If you're not sure where to start when looking for the next multi-bagger, there are a few key trends you should keep an eye out for. In a perfect world, we'd like to see a company investing more capital into its business and ideally the returns earned from that capital are also increasing. This shows us that it's a compounding machine, able to continually reinvest its earnings back into the business and generate higher returns. With that in mind, the ROCE of CONSOL Energy (NYSE:CEIX) looks great, so lets see what the trend can tell us.

Return On Capital Employed (ROCE): What Is It?

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. To calculate this metric for CONSOL Energy, this is the formula:

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

0.22 = US$491m ÷ (US$2.7b - US$515m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2022).

Therefore, CONSOL Energy has an ROCE of 22%. On its own, that's a very good return and it's on par with the returns earned by companies in a similar industry.

In the above chart we have measured CONSOL Energy's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like, you can check out the forecasts from the analysts covering CONSOL Energy here for free.

What The Trend Of ROCE Can Tell Us

CONSOL Energy has not disappointed with their ROCE growth. The figures show that over the last five years, ROCE has grown 211% whilst employing roughly the same amount of capital. So our take on this is that the business has increased efficiencies to generate these higher returns, all the while not needing to make any additional investments. The company is doing well in that sense, and it's worth investigating what the management team has planned for long term growth prospects.

Our Take On CONSOL Energy's ROCE

As discussed above, CONSOL Energy appears to be getting more proficient at generating returns since capital employed has remained flat but earnings (before interest and tax) are up. Since the stock has returned a solid 76% to shareholders over the last five years, it's fair to say investors are beginning to recognize these changes. In light of that, we think it's worth looking further into this stock because if CONSOL Energy can keep these trends up, it could have a bright future ahead.