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Is Mueller Water Products, Inc.'s (NYSE:MWA) Stock's Recent Performance Being Led By Its Attractive Financial Prospects?

Mueller Water Products (NYSE:MWA) has had a great run on the share market with its stock up by a significant 21% over the last three months. Since the market usually pay for a company’s long-term fundamentals, we decided to study the company’s key performance indicators to see if they could be influencing the market. Specifically, we decided to study Mueller Water Products' ROE in this article.

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. Put another way, it reveals the company's success at turning shareholder investments into profits.

See our latest analysis for Mueller Water Products

How To Calculate Return On Equity?

Return on equity can be calculated by using the formula:

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

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Mueller Water Products is:

14% = US$86m ÷ US$610m (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2020).

The 'return' refers to a company's earnings over the last year. One way to conceptualize this is that for each $1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made $0.14 in profit.

Why Is ROE Important For Earnings Growth?

So far, we've learned that ROE is a measure of a company's profitability. 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.

A Side By Side comparison of Mueller Water Products' Earnings Growth And 14% ROE

At first glance, Mueller Water Products seems to have a decent ROE. On comparing with the average industry ROE of 11% the company's ROE looks pretty remarkable. This certainly adds some context to Mueller Water Products' decent 16% net income growth seen over the past five years.

As a next step, we compared Mueller Water Products' net income growth with the industry, and pleasingly, we found that the growth seen by the company is higher than the average industry growth of 10%.

past-earnings-growth
past-earnings-growth

Earnings growth is an important metric to consider when valuing a stock. It’s important for an investor to know whether the market has priced in the company's expected earnings growth (or decline). By doing so, they will have an idea if the stock is headed into clear blue waters or if swampy waters await. Is Mueller Water Products fairly valued compared to other companies? These 3 valuation measures might help you decide.

Is Mueller Water Products Efficiently Re-investing Its Profits?

With a three-year median payout ratio of 39% (implying that the company retains 61% of its profits), it seems that Mueller Water Products is reinvesting efficiently in a way that it sees respectable amount growth in its earnings and pays a dividend that's well covered.

Moreover, Mueller Water Products is determined to keep sharing its profits with shareholders which we infer from its long history of paying a dividend for at least ten years. Upon studying the latest analysts' consensus data, we found that the company is expected to keep paying out approximately 37% of its profits over the next three years.

Summary

In total, we are pretty happy with Mueller Water Products' performance. Specifically, we like that the company is reinvesting a huge chunk of its profits at a high rate of return. This of course has caused the company to see substantial growth in its earnings. With that said, the latest industry analyst forecasts reveal that the company's earnings growth is expected to slow down. To know more about the latest analysts predictions for the company, check out this visualization of analyst forecasts for the company.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

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