Suppose you had the opportunity to buy a big, lumbering company with huge sales but slender profits.
Would you do it?
You would if you thought you could turn the company around. Perhaps you could improve the product, raise prices, cut expenses or find other ways to improve those puny profits. Investors who are looking for turnaround candidates often use the price-to-sales ratio. To compute it, divide a stock’s price by the company’s sales per share. For example, Coca-Cola Co. (KO) has 4.3 billion shares outstanding and has revenue of about $33 billion.
That works out to $7.33 a share in sales. The stock fetched $54.48 at this writing, so the price-to-sales ratio was 7.43. That’s a high ratio, because Coca-Cola is a popular stock with high profit margins. Most stocks these days sell for between two and three times sales. Unpopular stocks with low profit margins sell for 1.0 times sales or less. I’m going to recommend some of those unpopular stocks today.