AgroFresh Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:AGFS) shareholders should be happy to see the share price up 17% in the last month. Meanwhile over the last three years the stock has dropped hard. Indeed, the share price is down a tragic 67% in the last three years. Some might say the recent bounce is to be expected after such a bad drop. Perhaps the company has turned over a new leaf.
Given that AgroFresh Solutions didn’t make a profit in the last twelve months, we’ll focus on revenue growth to form a quick view of its business development. When a company doesn’t make profits, we’d generally expect to see good revenue growth. That’s because it’s hard to be confident a company will be sustainable if revenue growth is negligible, and it never makes a profit.
Over the last three years, AgroFresh Solutions’ revenue dropped 3.2% per year. That is not a good result. With revenue in decline, and profit but a dream, we can understand why the share price has been declining at 19% per year. Having said that, if growth is coming in the future, now may be the low ebb for the company. We don’t generally like to own companies that lose money and can’t grow revenues. But any company is worth looking at when it makes a maiden profit.
The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).
A Different Perspective
While the broader market gained around 48% in the last year, AgroFresh Solutions shareholders lost 16%. However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. Unfortunately, last year’s performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 9% over the last half decade. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should “buy when there is blood on the streets”, but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality 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. For example, we’ve discovered 1 warning sign for AgroFresh Solutions that you should be aware of before investing here.
