Better Buy: Altria Group or Kraft Foods?

In a new Motley Fool series, we pit two stocks against each other on five criteria to determine the better buy.

Today's matchup is tobacco king Altria Group (NYSE: MO  ) vs. the food giant Kraft Foods (NYSE: KFT  ) , which used to be owned by Altria Group. Using five short-of-scientific-but-carefully chosen criteria, let's determine which is the better buy according to the numbers:

	Factor	Altria Group	Kraft Foods
Cheapness	(P/E ratio)	12.4	15.8
Growth	(5-year growth rate)	-21.5%	1.8%
Operations	(net margin %)	14.24%	5.99%
Balance Sheet	(debt/equity ratio)	3.21	.82
CAPS Rating	(scale of 1 to 5 stars)

Round 1: Cheapness

Advantage: Altria Group. Cheapness is determined by P/E ratio. The lower the better. Be careful of earnings near zero that skew the ratio, one-time gains and losses, and pasts that aren’t indicative of futures (the more dynamic the industry, the more this is true).

Round 2: Growth

Advantage: Kraft Foods. Growth here is the trailing 5-year EPS growth rate. This trailing earnings growth helps put notoriously optimistic Wall Street projections in perspective.

Round 3: Operations

Advantage: Altria Group. Net margin percentage shows how efficiently a company turns revenue into profit. The more similar the business models, the more relevant the comparison.

Round 4: Balance sheet

Advantage: Kraft Foods. As with net margins, the debt to capital ratio is most relevant in comparing companies in similar industries. In this battle we give the nod to the lower-debt company, but attention should also be paid to the cost of debt, interest coverage ratios, and the stability of the business (the more stable a company’s operations, the more debt it can safely carry).

Round 5: CAPS rating

Advantage: Altria Group. A company’s CAPS rating is our community’s opinion of the stock. Altria Group has a slightly greater numerical CAPS rating than Kraft Foods (even though they have the same number of stars). You can get more information on your stocks -- and our community’s opinions of those stocks -- by clicking over to our CAPS area.

Each of these five rankings need more context -- like, how these companies stack up against key competitors such as Reynolds American (NYSE: RAI  ) and Sara Lee (NYSE: SLE  ) . But these basic numbers suggest that Altria Group is a better buy. What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below.