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Herbalife Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) shareholders will doubtless be very grateful to see the share price up 30% in the last month. But that can't change the reality that over the longer term (five years), the returns have been really quite dismal. In that time the share price has delivered a rude shock to holders, who find themselves down 69% after a long stretch. Some might say the recent bounce is to be expected after such a bad drop. We'd err towards caution given the long term under-performance.
Since Herbalife has shed US$133m from its value in the past 7 days, let's see if the longer term decline has been driven by the business' economics.
See our latest analysis for Herbalife
To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.
While the share price declined over five years, Herbalife actually managed to increase EPS by an average of 15% per year. So it doesn't seem like EPS is a great guide to understanding how the market is valuing the stock. Alternatively, growth expectations may have been unreasonable in the past.
Due to the lack of correlation between the EPS growth and the falling share price, it's worth taking a look at other metrics to try to understand the share price movement.
In contrast to the share price, revenue has actually increased by 2.9% a year in the five year period. A more detailed examination of the revenue and earnings may or may not explain why the share price languishes; there could be an opportunity.
The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).
We like that insiders have been buying shares in the last twelve months. Even so, future earnings will be far more important to whether current shareholders make money. You can see what analysts are predicting for Herbalife in this interactive graph of future profit estimates.
A Different Perspective
Herbalife shareholders are down 41% for the year, but the market itself is up 4.0%. However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. Regrettably, last year's performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 11% per year over five years. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Herbalife better, we need to consider many other factors. To that end, you should be aware of the 2 warning signs we've spotted with Herbalife .