In This Article:
We're definitely into long term investing, but some companies are simply bad investments over any time frame. We don't wish catastrophic capital loss on anyone. Imagine if you held The9 Limited (NASDAQ:NCTY) for half a decade as the share price tanked 79%. Furthermore, it's down 24% in about a quarter. That's not much fun for holders. We note that the company has reported results fairly recently; and the market is hardly delighted. You can check out the latest numbers in our company report.
Since shareholders are down over the longer term, lets look at the underlying fundamentals over the that time and see if they've been consistent with returns.
The9 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. Shareholders of unprofitable companies usually desire strong revenue growth. That's because fast revenue growth can be easily extrapolated to forecast profits, often of considerable size.
In the last half decade, The9 saw its revenue increase by 35% per year. That's well above most other pre-profit companies. So on the face of it we're really surprised to see the share price has averaged a fall of 12% each year, in the same time period. It could be that the stock was over-hyped before. While there might be an opportunity here, you'd want to take a close look at the balance sheet strength.
The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).
You can see how its balance sheet has strengthened (or weakened) over time in this free interactive graphic.
A Different Perspective
It's nice to see that The9 shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 71% over the last year. That certainly beats the loss of about 12% per year over the last half decade. We generally put more weight on the long term performance over the short term, but the recent improvement could hint at a (positive) inflection point within the business. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Like risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 3 warning signs for The9 (of which 2 are concerning!) you should know about.