ROE — return on equity
What it measures¶
ROE is the year's net income (the bottom line of the income statement) divided by the owners' equity — what the balance sheet says belongs to the owners once every debt is subtracted from every asset. The Fundamentals page uses the average of the equity at the start and the end of the year, because profit is earned over the whole year while equity is counted at single moments. ROE answers: how much profit did the company make on the owners' money?
Why it is on the page¶
It is the headline measure of how well a company uses its owners' money. Its weakness is that a high ROE can come from an excellent business or from an ordinary one carrying a lot of debt, since debt shrinks the equity it is divided by. The DuPont decomposition on the same page splits ROE into its parts to show which.
Thresholds, their source and the population they were fitted on¶
The page draws no zones for ROE: no published line applies across industries, and a high figure can be a sign of strength or of leverage. ROE does not feed any check of the summary; the condition band judges returns on assets and on invested capital instead.
| Reference | What it shows | Source |
|---|---|---|
| the DuPont product | the same ROE rebuilt from five factors, which must agree | the page's own arithmetic |
| the provider's figure | the data provider's ROE, shown beside for comparison | yfinance |
- Fitted on: no population — a descriptive ratio.
- Evidence grade: not graded.
A worked example¶
Celestica, as the Fundamentals page showed it on 9 August 2026 (fiscal year 2025): ROE 40.49%. The data provider's own figure read 52.45%, because it uses twelve months of profit to a different date and an equity figure it does not state; the page shows both rather than choosing one. The DuPont panel shows that this ROE came from turning assets over fast (1.88 times a year) and from leverage (3.21 times as many assets as equity), not from a high margin (8%).
What “No verdict” means here¶
ROE carries no verdict of its own; the panel's header shows the verdict of its area. The row reads insufficient data — requires the prior period for the oldest year, which has no opening equity to average, and not applicable when the average equity is zero or negative.
What the verdict is and is not¶
The figure describes one year's profit against the owners' recorded stake. It is not a judgement of the business, not a forecast, and not an instruction to trade the shares. A company that has bought back many shares can show a very high ROE simply because its equity is small.