There are more than 1000 Bursa-listed companies in Malaysia. Out of that population, which are the companies that never lose money since listed? The following is a study of such companies. As usual, I am using the data from the free KLSE screener. So the accuracy of this study is highly dependent on third party data.

I am using the financial table of a specific company on the KLSE screener website to check whether the company is losing or profiting for each quarter. For this, I can either use the “EPS” or the “P/L” (profit/loss) columns. A negative value for the quarter means it is a losing quarter: The company is losing money on that quarter.

Financial records of P&O on KLSE Screener

These companies never lose money

So here is the result in a table format. The column “Quarters” indicates how many quarters each company has been earning money consecutively.

You can download the data here: Companies That Never Lose Money 20150608 (.csv).

The earliest records that I can access are up to 51 quarters ago (12.75 years ago). This is due to the limitation from the website that I am using. Some of the companies, that never lose money, have shorter number of quarters like 12 is because they are being listed just not long ago. So there is no public financial record before that.

Out of the total 1045 companies available at KLSE screener, there are a total of 246 companies that never lose money. That is roughly around 23.5 % of the total population in Bursa Malaysia.

It is not easy to start a business. It is ever harder to start a business that makes money. Starting a business that never lose money is like a dream for everyone. So I suspect either those companies are really making money like clock work or some of them are cooking their book! Well, I hope not.

Invest in a company that never loses money is a safe bet because time is your friend. The longer it operates, the more money it makes. Still, you need to investigate whether those companies have high debt or capital expenditure etc to determine whether those earned monies are kept or spent. I like companies that accumulate tons of cash. They earn much more then they are able to spend it!

Note: This study does not involve the earning growth. I don’t look at whether the earning are growing or decreasing which is a major factor that determine growth of the share price.