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Mr Mr

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The Best Way to Measure Company Performance 2010-03-04T19:09:43Z

By John Hagel III and John Seely Brown Most Wall Street analysts and investors tend to focus on return on equity as their primary measure of company performance. Many executives focus heavily on this metric as well, recognizing that it is the one that seems to get the most attention from the investor community. But is it the best metric? Even though more sophisticated valuation techniques like IRR, CFROI, and DCF modeling have come along, ROE has proven enduring. At one level, this makes sense. ROE focuses on return to the shareholders of the company. If you are a shareholder, this gives you a quick and easy to understand metric. But ROE can obscure a lot of potential problems. If investors are not careful, it can divert attention from business fundamentals and lead to nasty surprises. Companies can resort to financial strategies to artificially maintain a healthy ROE — for a while — and hide deteriorating performance in business fundamentals. Growing debt leverage and stock buybacks funded through accumulated cash can help to maintain a company's ROE even though operational profitability is eroding. Mounting competitive pressure combined with artificially low interest rates, characteristic of the last couple of decades, creates a potent incentive to engage in these strategies to keep investors happy. Excessive debt leverage becomes a significant albatross for a company when market demand for its products heads south, as many companies discovered during the current economic downturn. It actually creates more risk for a company in hard times. These efforts can become addictive. If underlying profitability continues to deteriorate, more stock buybacks or debt leverage will be necessary to maintain return on equity, further increasing company exposure to unanticipated downturns in consumer demand or

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