What are the early trends we should look for to identify a stock that could multiply in value over the long term? 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. And in light of that, the trends we're seeing at InterDigital's (NASDAQ:IDCC) look very promising so lets take a look.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

For those who don't know, ROCE is a measure of a company's yearly pre-tax profit (its return), relative to the capital employed in the business. The formula for this calculation on InterDigital is:

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

0.26 = US$229m ÷ (US$1.8b - US$881m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2023).

Therefore, InterDigital has an ROCE of 26%. In absolute terms that's a great return and it's even better than the Software industry average of 7.7%.

In the above chart we have measured InterDigital'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 free analyst report for InterDigital .

So How Is InterDigital's ROCE Trending?

We're pretty happy with how the ROCE has been trending at InterDigital. The figures show that over the last five years, returns on capital have grown by 495%. That's not bad because this tells for every dollar invested (capital employed), the company is increasing the amount earned from that dollar. Speaking of capital employed, the company is actually utilizing 39% less than it was five years ago, which can be indicative of a business that's improving its efficiency. InterDigital may be selling some assets so it's worth investigating if the business has plans for future investments to increase returns further still.

For the record though, there was a noticeable increase in the company's current liabilities over the period, so we would attribute some of the ROCE growth to that. Essentially the business now has suppliers or short-term creditors funding about 50% of its operations, which isn't ideal. And with current liabilities at those levels, that's pretty high.

The Bottom Line On InterDigital's ROCE

In the end, InterDigital has proven it's capital allocation skills are good with those higher returns from less amount of capital. And with a respectable 74% awarded to those who held the stock over the last five years, you could argue that these developments are starting to get the attention they deserve. So given the stock has proven it has promising trends, it's worth researching the company further to see if these trends are likely to persist.

If you want to continue researching InterDigital, you might be interested to know about the 2 warning signs that our analysis has discovered.

If you want to search for more stocks that have been earning high returns, check out this free list of stocks with solid balance sheets that are also earning high 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.