Pure numbers don’t tell investors everything they need to know about a company’s potential. Although many investors use the price-to-earnings ratio as a kind of shorthand for whether the market is pricing the business appropriately, the numbers are not always what they seem.
A company can decide that while it originally thought it was in a particular niche, it realizes there are more expansive definitions of what it does and that might not show up immediately on the bottom line, but over time it could come to define the business.