price to sales ratio

A stock's capitalization divided by its sales over the trailing 12 months. The value is the same whether the calculation is done for the whole company or on a per-share basis. A low price to sales ratio (for example, below 1.0) is usually thought to be a better investment since the investor is paying less for each unit of sales. However, sales don't reveal the whole picture, since the company might be unprofitable. Because of the limitations, price to sales ratio are usually used only for unprofitable companies, since such companies don't have a price/earnings ratio (P/E ratio).