Industry Management Effectiveness
Return-on-capital benchmarks for Industry: Return on Assets, Return on Investment and Return on Equity, with cross-industry rankings.
Where the margin profile measures profit per dollar of sales, these ratios measure profit per dollar of capital — how efficiently the industry turns assets, invested capital and equity into earnings. Commercial access adds ROIC, DuPont decomposition, asset turnover and financial leverage across the peer set.
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Industry Returns on Capital
| Metric | — | — | — | — | — |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Return on Assets (TTM) Net income / total assets |
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| Return on Investment (TTM) Net income / invested capital |
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| Return on Equity (TTM) Net income / shareholders' equity |
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Multi-period returns on capital and peer rankings for Industry require a subscription or commercial license.
Returns on Capital in Capital Allocation, Credit & Equity Research
Return on assets, investment and equity answer a different question than margins do: not how much profit a sale carries, but how much profit the capital tied up in the business throws off. A company can run thin margins and still compound capital quickly if it turns its asset base over fast enough — which is exactly why these ratios sit at the centre of capital-allocation work.
Boards and management teams benchmark their returns against the industry to decide whether to reinvest, buy back stock or return cash; a business earning below its cost of capital destroys value no matter how the income statement reads. Where this industry's returns sit relative to peers, and which way they are trending, frames that call.
Lenders and credit committees lean on ROA and asset turnover to gauge how productively assets are financed, while equity analysts decompose ROE into margin, turnover and leverage (the DuPont view) to separate genuine operating quality from returns that are merely borrowed. For the per-dollar-of-sales side of the story, see the margin profile.
| Metric | Q3 2026 TTM | Q2 2026 TTM | Q1 2026 TTM | Q4 2025 TTM | Q3 2025 TTM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core returns on capital | |||||
| Return on Assets Net income / total assets |
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| Return on Equity Net income / shareholders' equity |
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| Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) NOPAT / invested capital |
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| Operating ROA Operating income / assets |
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| Incremental ROIC Change in NOPAT / change in capital |
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| DuPont & efficiency | |||||
| DuPont ROE Net margin x asset turnover x leverage |
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| Financial Leverage Assets / equity (x100) |
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| Operating Leverage Operating leverage ratio |
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| Capital Intensity Assets / revenue (x100) |
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| Cash conversion | |||||
| FCF / Net Income Free cash flow vs net income |
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| FCF / Operating Income Free cash flow vs operating income |
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| Operating Cash Flow / Net Income Cash conversion |
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| Capital allocation & quality | |||||
| Retention Ratio Earnings retained vs paid out |
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| Sustainable Growth Rate ROE x retention |
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| Management Effectiveness Score Composite, 0-100 |
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| ROIC distribution (cross-sectional) | |||||
| ROIC Median Cross-sectional median |
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| ROIC 25th Pct. Lower quartile |
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| ROIC 75th Pct. Upper quartile |
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| ROIC Std. Dev. Dispersion across peers |
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| ROIC IQR (Spread) P75 - P25 |
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| ROIC 10th Pct. Lower decile |
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| ROIC 90th Pct. Upper decile |
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| ROIC Mean Abs. Deviation Robust dispersion |
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| ROIC Z-Score Std deviations from peer mean |
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| Coverage | |||||
| Operating Income Reported # companies reported |
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| Net Income Reported # companies reported |
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| Cross-industry percentile | |||||
| ROE Cross-Industry Percentile Where ROE ranks across all industries |
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Return on assets / invested capital, the DuPont decomposition, cash-conversion and dispersion stats for credit, risk and quant models require a commercial license.
| Metric | FY 2025 | FY 2024 | FY 2023 | FY 2022 | FY 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core returns on capital | |||||
| Return on Assets Net income / total assets |
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| Return on Equity Net income / shareholders' equity |
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| Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) NOPAT / invested capital |
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| Operating ROA Operating income / assets |
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| Incremental ROIC Change in NOPAT / change in capital |
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| DuPont & efficiency | |||||
| DuPont ROE Net margin x asset turnover x leverage |
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| Financial Leverage Assets / equity (x100) |
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| Operating Leverage Operating leverage ratio |
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| Capital Intensity Assets / revenue (x100) |
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| Cash conversion | |||||
| FCF / Net Income Free cash flow vs net income |
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| FCF / Operating Income Free cash flow vs operating income |
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| Operating Cash Flow / Net Income Cash conversion |
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| Capital allocation & quality | |||||
| Retention Ratio Earnings retained vs paid out |
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| Sustainable Growth Rate ROE x retention |
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| Management Effectiveness Score Composite, 0-100 |
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| ROIC distribution (cross-sectional) | |||||
| ROIC Median Cross-sectional median |
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| ROIC 25th Pct. Lower quartile |
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| ROIC 75th Pct. Upper quartile |
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| ROIC Std. Dev. Dispersion across peers |
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| ROIC IQR (Spread) P75 - P25 |
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| ROIC 10th Pct. Lower decile |
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| ROIC 90th Pct. Upper decile |
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| ROIC Mean Abs. Deviation Robust dispersion |
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| ROIC Z-Score Std deviations from peer mean |
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| Coverage | |||||
| Operating Income Reported # companies reported |
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| Net Income Reported # companies reported |
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| Cross-industry percentile | |||||
| ROE Cross-Industry Percentile Where ROE ranks across all industries |
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Return on assets / invested capital, the DuPont decomposition, cash-conversion and dispersion stats for credit, risk and quant models require a commercial license.
What drives return on capital in Industry
Industry earns about 6.7% on its assets and 39.7% on equity over the trailing year, with return on invested capital near 8.9%. That equity return is mostly balance-sheet math. The industry turns over only 0.75x of its assets in a year and carries 5.95x financial leverage, so an 8.9% net margin on a large asset base still compounds into the 39.7% you see. Return on assets stays thin at 6.7% for the same reason: the assets are there to be financed, not turned quickly.
Assets turn quickly here, about 0.75x a year, so returns track revenue more closely than the balance sheet. Incremental ROIC of 6.1% and a 26.0% sustainable growth rate point to capital that compounds rather than just sits.
For a quant or growth investor this is a quality-and-reinvestment read. An incremental ROIC of 6.1% shows what each fresh dollar of capital actually earns, which is most of the game when assets turn this fast. With assets turning about 0.75x a year, returns scale with revenue, the kind of signal that drops straight into a quality factor or a sector-rotation model. Private-equity growth teams screen the same way before they spend diligence hours.
The series runs back about twenty years, recorded point-in-time and normalized the same way for every industry. That is what makes it useful to people building models instead of reading pages: the same panel that feeds a backtest feeds a retrieval setup, and an agent grounded on this industry's 6.7% return on assets, 0.75x asset turnover and its place in the ROIC distribution answers more steadily than one reasoning from a stack of raw filings, because the comparable-numbers problem is already solved. It is a dataset built to be queried; the reasoning stays with whatever model you point at it.
Industry Benchmarking Dataset for Institutional Use
CommercialThe data presented above is part of our institutional-grade Industry Benchmarking Dataset, designed for integration into credit risk models, portfolio analytics, and internal banking systems. The full dataset is available under a Commercial License, with delivery via API or bulk CSV datasets.
Margin benchmarks across the full industry distribution
Gross, operating, EBITDA, pre-tax, net, and free cash flow margins - delivered as TTM, quarterly, and annual series with P25 / median / P75 / standard deviation for every reporting period.
Revenue, income & cash flow growth across 13+ line items
Industry-level growth benchmarks for every major P&L and cash flow line - with breadth indicators showing what share of companies posted positive growth, acceleration metrics, and rolling TTM comparisons.
Industry valuation multiples with 5-year context & Z-scores
P/E, P/S, P/FCF, P/Book, EV/EBITDA - current and trailing - with five-year averages, percentile ranks, Z-scores, and a composite valuation score to place the industry in historical context.
Productivity, turnover ratios & cash conversion benchmarks
Revenue and income per employee, asset and receivables turnover, days sales outstanding, days inventory, days payables, and the full cash conversion cycle - benchmarked across the industry distribution.
ROA, ROE, ROIC & DuPont decomposition benchmarks
Return metrics measuring how effectively management allocates capital - with incremental ROIC, DuPont decomposition, FCF quality indicators, and a composite management effectiveness score across the industry.
Leverage, liquidity & debt coverage across the industry
Debt-to-equity, interest and debt coverage, quick ratio, working capital, leverage ratios - full distribution statistics - in standardized, audit-ready format suited for credit workflows, compliance, and ESG reporting.
Decision Framework & Data Access
Power onboarding, benchmarking, and quantitative analysis with institutional-grade datasets structured for direct integration into financial models and risk frameworks.
- Industry benchmarking datasets (valuation, growth, profitability)
- Designed for quant models and benchmarking workflows
- Consistent time-series structure (Quarterly, TTM, Annual)
- Coverage across 100+ industries and 20+ years of history