In order to justify the effort of selecting individual stocks, it's worth striving to beat the returns from a market index fund. But every investor is virtually certain to have both over-performing and under-performing stocks. At this point some shareholders may be questioning their investment in Mandarin Oriental International Limited (SGX:M04), since the last five years saw the share price fall 17%.

With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.

See our latest analysis for Mandarin Oriental International

Mandarin Oriental International isn't currently profitable, so most analysts would look to revenue growth to get an idea of how fast the underlying business is growing. When a company doesn't make profits, we'd generally hope to see good revenue growth. That's because it's hard to be confident a company will be sustainable if revenue growth is negligible, and it never makes a profit.

In the last five years Mandarin Oriental International saw its revenue shrink by 3.0% per year. That's not what investors generally want to see. The stock hasn't done well for shareholders in the last five years, falling 3%, annualized. But it doesn't surprise given the falling revenue. It might be worth watching for signs of a turnaround - buyers are probably expecting one.

The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

You can see how its balance sheet has strengthened (or weakened) over time in this free interactive graphic.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. As it happens, Mandarin Oriental International's TSR for the last 5 years was -13%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

A Different Perspective

While the broader market lost about 3.5% in the twelve months, Mandarin Oriental International shareholders did even worse, losing 10% (even including dividends). However, it could simply be that the share price has been impacted by broader market jitters. It might be worth keeping an eye on the fundamentals, in case there's a good opportunity. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 2% over the last half decade. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should "buy when there is blood on the streets", but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Mandarin Oriental International better, we need to consider many other factors. Like risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 2 warning signs for Mandarin Oriental International (of which 1 can't be ignored!) you should know about.