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What You Must Know About Healthscope Limited’s (ASX:HSO) Return on Equity

I am writing today to help inform people who are new to the stock market and want to begin learning the link between Healthscope Limited (ASX:HSO)’s return fundamentals and stock market performance.

Healthscope Limited (ASX:HSO) delivered a less impressive 6.35% ROE over the past year, compared to the 11.41% return generated by its industry. Though HSO’s recent performance is underwhelming, it is useful to understand what ROE is made up of and how it should be interpreted. Knowing these components can change your views on HSO’s below-average returns. Metrics such as financial leverage can impact the level of ROE which in turn can affect the sustainability of HSO’s returns. Let me show you what I mean by this. View out our latest analysis for Healthscope

Breaking down Return on Equity

Firstly, Return on Equity, or ROE, is simply the percentage of last years’ earning against the book value of shareholders’ equity. For example, if the company invests A$1 in the form of equity, it will generate A$0.063 in earnings from this. While a higher ROE is preferred in most cases, there are several other factors we should consider before drawing any conclusions.

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Return on Equity = Net Profit ÷ Shareholders Equity

Returns are usually compared to costs to measure the efficiency of capital. Healthscope’s cost of equity is 8.55%. Given a discrepancy of -2.21% between return and cost, this indicated that Healthscope may be paying more for its capital than what it’s generating in return. 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

ASX:HSO Last Perf June 25th 18
ASX:HSO Last Perf June 25th 18

Essentially, profit margin shows how much money the company makes after paying for all its expenses. Asset turnover shows how much revenue Healthscope can generate with its current asset base. The most interesting ratio, and reflective of sustainability of its ROE, is financial leverage. Since financial leverage can artificially inflate ROE, we need to look at how much debt Healthscope currently has. The debt-to-equity ratio currently stands at a sensible 80.70%, meaning the ROE is a result of its capacity to produce profit growth without a huge debt burden.

ASX:HSO Historical Debt June 25th 18
ASX:HSO Historical Debt June 25th 18

Next Steps:

ROE is a simple yet informative ratio, illustrating the various components that each measure the quality of the overall stock. Healthscope’s below-industry ROE is disappointing, furthermore, its returns were not even high enough to cover its own cost of equity. However, ROE is not likely to be inflated by excessive debt funding, giving shareholders more conviction in the sustainability of returns, which has headroom to increase further. Although ROE can be a useful metric, it is only a small part of diligent research.

For Healthscope, I’ve put together three important aspects you should look at:

  1. 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.

  2. Valuation: What is Healthscope 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 Healthscope is currently mispriced by the market.

  3. Other High-Growth Alternatives : Are there other high-growth stocks you could be holding instead of Healthscope? 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.