If we want to find a potential multi-bagger, often there are underlying trends that can provide clues. In a perfect world, we'd like to see a company investing more capital into its business and ideally the returns earned from that capital are also increasing. This shows us that it's a compounding machine, able to continually reinvest its earnings back into the business and generate higher returns. So when we looked at Pets at Home Group (LON:PETS) and its trend of ROCE, we really liked what we saw.

What Is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. The formula for this calculation on Pets at Home Group is:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.11 = UK£140m ÷ (UK£1.7b - UK£364m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to October 2024).

So, Pets at Home Group has an ROCE of 11%.  In absolute terms, that's a pretty normal return, and it's somewhat close to the Specialty Retail industry average of 13%.

View our latest analysis for Pets at Home Group LSE:PETS Return on Capital Employed April 1st 2025

In the above chart we have measured Pets at Home Group's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our freeanalyst report for Pets at Home Group .

What The Trend Of ROCE Can Tell Us

Pets at Home Group is showing promise given that its ROCE is trending up and to the right. Looking at the data, we can see that even though capital employed in the business has remained relatively flat, the ROCE generated has risen by 35% over the last five years. So our take on this is that the business has increased efficiencies to generate these higher returns, all the while not needing to make any additional investments. It's worth looking deeper into this though because while it's great that the business is more efficient, it might also mean that going forward the areas to invest internally for the organic growth are lacking.

The Bottom Line

In summary, we're delighted to see that Pets at Home Group has been able to increase efficiencies and earn higher rates of return on the same amount of capital. Investors may not be impressed by the favorable underlying trends yet because over the last five years the stock has only returned 8.4% to shareholders. Given that, we'd look further into this stock in case it has more traits that could make it multiply in the long term.

Story Continues

On the other side of ROCE, we have to consider valuation. That's why we have a FREE intrinsic value estimation for PETS on our platform that is definitely worth checking out.

If you want to search for solid companies with great earnings, check out this freelist of companies with good balance sheets and impressive returns on equity.

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This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. 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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