Gibraltar Industries (NASDAQ:ROCK) has had a rough three months with its share price down 7.7%. However, the company's fundamentals look pretty decent, and long-term financials are usually aligned with future market price movements. In this article, we decided to focus on Gibraltar Industries' ROE.

ROE or return on equity is a useful tool to assess how effectively a company can generate returns on the investment it received from its shareholders. Simply put, it is used to assess the profitability of a company in relation to its equity capital.

See our latest analysis for Gibraltar Industries

How Do You Calculate Return On Equity?

The formula for ROE is:

Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) ÷ Shareholders' Equity

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Gibraltar Industries is:

12% = US$116m ÷ US$976m (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2024).

The 'return' is the profit over the last twelve months. So, this means that for every $1 of its shareholder's investments, the company generates a profit of $0.12.

Why Is ROE Important For Earnings Growth?

We have already established that ROE serves as an efficient profit-generating gauge for a company's future earnings. We now need to evaluate how much profit the company reinvests or "retains" for future growth which then gives us an idea about the growth potential of the company. Generally speaking, other things being equal, firms with a high return on equity and profit retention, have a higher growth rate than firms that don’t share these attributes.

Gibraltar Industries' Earnings Growth And 12% ROE

To start with, Gibraltar Industries' ROE looks acceptable. Yet, the fact that the company's ROE is lower than the industry average of 19% does temper our expectations. Although, we can see that Gibraltar Industries saw a modest net income growth of 12% over the past five years. We reckon that there could be other factors at play here. Such as - high earnings retention or an efficient management in place. Bear in mind, the company does have a respectable level of ROE. It is just that the industry ROE is higher. So this also does lend some color to the fairly high earnings growth seen by the company.

Next, on comparing with the industry net income growth, we found that Gibraltar Industries' reported growth was lower than the industry growth of 18% over the last few years, which is not something we like to see.

The basis for attaching value to a company is, to a great extent, tied to its earnings growth. What investors need to determine next is if the expected earnings growth, or the lack of it, is already built into the share price. Doing so will help them establish if the stock's future looks promising or ominous. Has the market priced in the future outlook for ROCK? You can find out in our latest intrinsic value infographic research report.