Value Relevance of DuPont Identity

Abstract

This study provides an empirical support to the relevance of very prevalent and well-established almost a century ago the DuPont Identity in the context of India, one of big 10 emerging markets (Garten, 1997). The DuPont Identity, a familiar form of financial statement analysis (Soliman, 2008) for use in equity valuation (Nissim and Penman, 2001), decomposes the return on equity (ROE) into three multiplicative components: net profit margin (operating efficiency), assets turnover ratio (asset use efficiency) and equity multiplier (financial leverage). The present study is based on the valuation theory which considers the viewpoint of equity investors to empirical investigate the value relevance of accounting information (Beisland, 2009). In this study, value relevance of three measures of accounting information used in the DuPont Identity is investigated for 228 manufacturing firms listed in National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India over a period of ten years from 2006-07 to 2015-2016. The findings indicate that the firms should focus on asset use efficiency and financial leverage components of DuPont Identity since a statistically significant impact of these two components on the stock returns is found. The strategic use of asset efficiency and financial leverage inevitably ensures the operating efficiency of the firms. This empirical investigation is an addition to the value relevance literature with an important insight to the firms and the participants of stock market about the usefulness of DuPont Identity in the context of India.