Oops. The $100m was a typo in my spreadsheet transposed to post. Only excuse I can offer is that I was eating squid and typing with one hand.

Du Pont is not intended as a ROE measure, the last part of the equation turns it into an ROE measure but it gets you back to where you should be anyway If the user stuck with a simple ROE calc.

Du Pont is really a qualitative measure used to weed out low margin, high Capex businesses or identify high margin / low capex stars. I suspect without intending to DuPont also created a benchmarking tool because to my mind it is really most effective when measuring peers rather than a grab-bag of targets.

Du Pont alone (without trying to get back to ROE) is (Profit / Sales) * (Sales / net Assets). So I'm not sure if it tells you much of anything useful to compare a low margin / low asset supermaket with a high margin / high asset property company for instance. Particularly on a trending series, I think it is more useful to compare a basket of super market operators or a basket of property companies.

It's one measure though and I suspect not popular for some good reasons. Not least of which is you can't tell what you are seeing from the results - did Assets or Margins contribute most to the outcome? Buffett's simple tenets are much easier by keeping them on separate lines.