According to Professor Novy-Marx, the gross profitability (gross profit/total asset) is a return metric that has the same power as price to book value in prediction cross section returns of a stock.

When I compared Bursa Malaysia plantation company, United Malacca gross profitability with that of the sector median, you can see that it clearly underperformed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhboTCMdEg

This underperformance is not so clear cut when you look at ROE.
https://i.postimg.cc/6QJy1P2f/United-Malacca.png

Moral of the story? Return is one key measure of profitability and I normally look at several return metrics – ROE, ROA, Gross Profitability, NOPAT/Capital to get a better picture.