Haverty Furniture Companies (NYSE:HVT) has had a great run on the share market with its stock up by a significant 14% 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. In this article, we decided to focus on Haverty Furniture Companies' 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. In simpler terms, it measures the profitability of a company in relation to shareholder's equity.

Check out our latest analysis for Haverty Furniture Companies

How Is ROE Calculated?

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 Haverty Furniture Companies is:

21% = US$65m ÷ US$316m (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2023).

The 'return' is the yearly profit. So, this means that for every $1 of its shareholder's investments, the company generates a profit of $0.21.

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. Assuming all else is equal, companies that have both a higher return on equity and higher profit retention are usually the ones that have a higher growth rate when compared to companies that don't have the same features.

Haverty Furniture Companies' Earnings Growth And 21% ROE

To begin with, Haverty Furniture Companies seems to have a respectable ROE. And on comparing with the industry, we found that the the average industry ROE is similar at 21%. This probably goes some way in explaining Haverty Furniture Companies' significant 27% net income growth over the past five years amongst other factors. We believe that there might also be other aspects that are positively influencing the company's earnings growth. Such as - high earnings retention or an efficient management in place.

We then performed a comparison between Haverty Furniture Companies' net income growth with the industry, which revealed that the company's growth is similar to the average industry growth of 27% in the same 5-year period.