Appraising the Usefulness of Ratios Used in DuPont System in Predicting Profitability

In economic theory, there is no more important proposition than that, under competition, the rate of return on investment tends toward equality in all industries’. Although this notion is applicable to total profitability measures such as return on assets (ROA), there is good reason to believe that various components of ROA identified by Dupont analysis will not revert to economy-wide levels, Industries have unique operating structures that Dupont analysis decomposes return on investment such as ROA into two multiplicative components, Profit margin (PM) and Asset turnover (ATO). This analysis is useful because each component measures different aspects of a firm’s operation. Advocate of this type of analysis claim that the components of ROA should provide additional insight into the business and operations of the firm and assist in forecasting. In this paper I examined whether Industry part of profit margin, Asset turnover and return on assets and Industry adjusted values of these variables (called abnormal) can predict future values (changes) of these variables, I found that decomposing each of these components into an abnormal and Industry component is useful for predicting also I found that profit margin and Asset turnover has a negative correlation with each other and the same is true with, their abnormal, (Industry-adjusted). In this paper pooled regression is used in predicting ROA, PM, and ATO of Industries and their Industry-adjusted values. Result showed that the regression equation is informative and significant. and provides enough information for decision making.