July 9, 2019
ROIC as an Incentive Measure
– Broc Romanek
Here’s the intro from this piece by Semler Brossy’s Barry Sullivan and Rami Glatt:
Today, nearly one-third of the S&P 500 companies measure Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), or a similar capital measure, in their executive incentive programs. Why is there so much interest in ROIC for executive incentives? Investors often look to ROIC as a key indicator of management’s effectiveness and an important driver of premium shareholder returns. The financial theory is pure: ROIC captures how well a company and its management team uses its capital — both equity and debt — to generate earnings.
ROIC can be useful in absolute — to help ensure a company is generating a return above the cost of the capital it uses. ROIC can also be useful as a relative test. Investors often pick stocks based on whether – and by how much – a given company is outperforming other players in the same industry.
Again, the financial theory is pure, and there is real-world evidence to support it. The chart below shows that premium shareholder returns come with strong ROIC, in balance with top-line growth over time. Importantly, growth is a necessary balance to ROIC, in our view, to help ensure a company’s ROIC is sustainable over time, and not simply a function of short-term behaviors (e.g., “pumping” earnings, or “starving” the asset base).