Despite delivering investors losses of 55% over the past 5 years, Zalando (ETR:ZAL) has been growing its earnings

Yahoo

02-07-2025

Statistically speaking, long term investing is a profitable endeavour. But that doesn't mean long term investors can avoid big losses. Zooming in on an example, the Zalando SE (ETR:ZAL) share price dropped 55% in the last half decade. That's an unpleasant experience for long term holders. Shareholders have had an even rougher run lately, with the share price down 13% in the last 90 days.
While the stock has risen 8.1% in the past week but long term shareholders are still in the red, let's see what the fundamentals can tell us.
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To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.
While the share price declined over five years, Zalando actually managed to increase EPS by an average of 53% per year. So it doesn't seem like EPS is a great guide to understanding how the market is valuing the stock. Or possibly, the market was previously very optimistic, so the stock has disappointed, despite improving EPS.
Because of the sharp contrast between the EPS growth rate and the share price growth, we're inclined to look to other metrics to understand the changing market sentiment around the stock.
In contrast to the share price, revenue has actually increased by 6.8% a year in the five year period. So it seems one might have to take closer look at the fundamentals to understand why the share price languishes. After all, there may be an opportunity.
The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).
It's probably worth noting that the CEO is paid less than the median at similar sized companies. But while CEO remuneration is always worth checking, the really important question is whether the company can grow earnings going forward. So we recommend checking out this free report showing consensus forecasts
It's nice to see that Zalando shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 28% over the last year. Notably the five-year annualised TSR loss of 9% per year compares very unfavourably with the recent share price performance. This makes us a little wary, but the business might have turned around its fortunes. Before deciding if you like the current share price, check how Zalando scores on these 3 valuation metrics.
If you like to buy stocks alongside management, then you might just love this free list of companies. (Hint: many of them are unnoticed AND have attractive valuation).
Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on German exchanges.
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