Ignoring the stock price of a company, what are the underlying trends that tell us a business is past the growth phase? Businesses in decline often have two underlying trends, firstly, a declining return on capital employed (ROCE) and a declining base of capital employed. This reveals that the company isn't compounding shareholder wealth because returns are falling and its net asset base is shrinking. On that note, looking into Vince Holding (NYSE:VNCE), we weren't too upbeat about how things were going.

Just to clarify if you're unsure, ROCE is a metric for evaluating how much pre-tax income (in percentage terms) a company earns on the capital invested in its business. To calculate this metric for Vince Holding, this is the formula:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.0013 = US$250k ÷ (US$254m - US$68m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to August 2024).

Therefore, Vince Holding has an ROCE of 0.1%. In absolute terms, that's a low return and it also under-performs the Luxury industry average of 13%.

See our latest analysis for Vince Holding

In the above chart we have measured Vince Holding's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like, you can check out the forecasts from the analysts covering Vince Holding for free.

The trend of ROCE at Vince Holding is showing some signs of weakness. The company used to generate 3.6% on its capital five years ago but it has since fallen noticeably. What's equally concerning is that the amount of capital deployed in the business has shrunk by 28% over that same period. When you see both ROCE and capital employed diminishing, it can often be a sign of a mature and shrinking business that might be in structural decline. If these underlying trends continue, we wouldn't be too optimistic going forward.

In short, lower returns and decreasing amounts capital employed in the business doesn't fill us with confidence. This could explain why the stock has sunk a total of 91% in the last five years. With underlying trends that aren't great in these areas, we'd consider looking elsewhere.

Vince Holding does come with some risks though, we found 5 warning signs in our investment analysis, and 1 of those can't be ignored...

If you want to search for solid companies with great earnings, check out this free list of companies with good balance sheets and impressive returns on equity.