As an investor its worth striving to ensure your overall portfolio beats the market average. But its virtually certain that sometimes you will buy stocks that fall short of the market average returns. Unfortunately, that's been the case for longer term Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel Co., Ltd. (SZSE:000825) shareholders, since the share price is down 42% in the last three years, falling well short of the market decline of around 17%.
After losing 4.6% this past week, it's worth investigating the company's fundamentals to see what we can infer from past performance.
View our latest analysis for Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel
Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel wasn't profitable in the last twelve months, it is unlikely we'll see a strong correlation between its share price and its earnings per share (EPS). Arguably revenue is our next best option. When a company doesn't make profits, we'd generally hope to see good revenue growth. That's because fast revenue growth can be easily extrapolated to forecast profits, often of considerable size.
Over three years, Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel grew revenue at 7.5% per year. Given it's losing money in pursuit of growth, we are not really impressed with that. Indeed, the stock dropped 12% over the last three years. If revenue growth accelerates, we might see the share price bounce. But the real upside for shareholders will be if the company can start generating profits.
The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).