Canadian National Railway Company's (TSE:CNR) Stock Has Been Sliding But Fundamentals Look Strong: Is The Market Wrong?

Simply Wall St · 04/17 17:37

Canadian National Railway (TSE:CNR) has had a rough three months with its share price down 6.9%. However, a closer look at its sound financials might cause you to think again. Given that fundamentals usually drive long-term market outcomes, the company is worth looking at. In this article, we decided to focus on Canadian National Railway's ROE.

Return on equity or ROE is a key measure used to assess how efficiently a company's management is utilizing the company's capital. Simply put, it is used to assess the profitability of a company in relation to its equity capital.

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How To Calculate Return On Equity?

The formula for return on equity is:

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

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Canadian National Railway is:

21% = CA$4.4b ÷ CA$21b (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2024).

The 'return' is the yearly profit. One way to conceptualize this is that for each CA$1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made CA$0.21 in profit.

See our latest analysis for Canadian National Railway

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. Based on how much of its profits the company chooses to reinvest or "retain", we are then able to evaluate a company's future ability to generate profits. Assuming everything else remains unchanged, the higher the ROE and profit retention, the higher the growth rate of a company compared to companies that don't necessarily bear these characteristics.

A Side By Side comparison of Canadian National Railway's Earnings Growth And 21% ROE

To begin with, Canadian National Railway seems to have a respectable ROE. On comparing with the average industry ROE of 14% the company's ROE looks pretty remarkable. Probably as a result of this, Canadian National Railway was able to see a decent growth of 7.5% over the last five years.

Next, on comparing with the industry net income growth, we found that Canadian National Railway's reported growth was lower than the industry growth of 10% over the last few years, which is not something we like to see.

past-earnings-growth
TSX:CNR Past Earnings Growth April 17th 2025

Earnings growth is a huge factor in stock valuation. 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. What is CNR worth today? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether CNR is currently mispriced by the market.

Is Canadian National Railway Making Efficient Use Of Its Profits?

Canadian National Railway has a healthy combination of a moderate three-year median payout ratio of 39% (or a retention ratio of 61%) and a respectable amount of growth in earnings as we saw above, meaning that the company has been making efficient use of its profits.

Moreover, Canadian National Railway 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. Based on the latest analysts' estimates, we found that the company's future payout ratio over the next three years is expected to hold steady at 40%. However, Canadian National Railway's ROE is predicted to rise to 27% despite there being no anticipated change in its payout ratio.

Summary

In total, we are pretty happy with Canadian National Railway's 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 a good amount of growth in its earnings. The latest industry analyst forecasts show that the company is expected to maintain its current growth rate. Are these analysts expectations based on the broad expectations for the industry, or on the company's fundamentals? Click here to be taken to our analyst's forecasts page for the company.