Beat 'em if you can

Equity and debt are a company's source of assets. As an investor, we want optimal returns on them. The widely tracked ratios are return on equity (RoE) and return on capital employed (RoCE). From a company's perspective, however, what matters is the total assets which are available to it to exploit as a resource. Hence, one important gauge to measure the efficiency of earnings is to look at the return on assets (RoA) ratio. Service companies, by nature of their business, are asset-light. A high return on assets is a common phenomenon for them. On the other hand, manufacturing companies' assets are a major driver of their profitability. A consistently high RoA in the case of manufacturing companies means that the company is utilising its assets in the most-efficient way. A high RoA is the result of good management planning and presence of a moat around the product. We wanted to find those companies that have delivered not only high RoE and RoCE but also a high RoA in the past five years. In the list of such companies, we further refined the results by adding go