When close to half the companies in the United States have price-to-earnings ratios (or "P/E's") above 19x, you may consider Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX) as an attractive investment with its 11.8x P/E ratio. Although, it's not wise to just take the P/E at face value as there may be an explanation why it's limited.

Recent times have been advantageous for Open Text as its earnings have been rising faster than most other companies. It might be that many expect the strong earnings performance to degrade substantially, which has repressed the P/E. If you like the company, you'd be hoping this isn't the case so that you could potentially pick up some stock while it's out of favour.

Want the full picture on analyst estimates for the company? Then our free report on Open Text will help you uncover what's on the horizon.

What Are Growth Metrics Telling Us About The Low P/E?

Open Text's P/E ratio would be typical for a company that's only expected to deliver limited growth, and importantly, perform worse than the market.

Retrospectively, the last year delivered an exceptional 297% gain to the company's bottom line. The latest three year period has also seen an excellent 46% overall rise in EPS, aided by its short-term performance. Accordingly, shareholders would have probably welcomed those medium-term rates of earnings growth.

Looking ahead now, EPS is anticipated to slump, contracting by 24% during the coming year according to the ten analysts following the company. That's not great when the rest of the market is expected to grow by 13%.

With this information, we are not surprised that Open Text is trading at a P/E lower than the market. However, shrinking earnings are unlikely to lead to a stable P/E over the longer term. There's potential for the P/E to fall to even lower levels if the company doesn't improve its profitability.

What We Can Learn From Open Text's P/E?

Typically, we'd caution against reading too much into price-to-earnings ratios when settling on investment decisions, though it can reveal plenty about what other market participants think about the company.

As we suspected, our examination of Open Text's analyst forecasts revealed that its outlook for shrinking earnings is contributing to its low P/E. At this stage investors feel the potential for an improvement in earnings isn't great enough to justify a higher P/E ratio. Unless these conditions improve, they will continue to form a barrier for the share price around these levels.

Of course, you might also be able to find a better stock than Open Text. So you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have reasonable P/E ratios and have grown earnings strongly.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.