InterDigital Is Better Than You Think

InterDigital (Nasdaq: IDCC  ) may be cheaper than you think.

The daily noise machine of CNBC, analyst estimates, and quarterly announcements inundate investors with talking heads obsessing over earnings-per-share figures.

Earnings, or net income, is an accounting construction that forms the basis for the price-to-earnings ratio, the most popular way of measuring how cheap or expensive a stock is.

But free cash flow -- the amount of cash a company earns on its operations minus what it spends on them -- is another, often more accurate measure of earnings that can give you an advantage.

How InterDigital stacks up                                
If InterDigital tends to generate more free cash flow than net income, there's a good chance earnings-per-share figures understate its profitability and overstate its price tag. Conversely, if InterDigital consistently generates less free cash flow than net income, it may be less profitable and more expensive than it appears.

This graph compares InterDigital's historical net income to free cash flow. (I omitted various gains and charges such as tax deferrals, restructurings, and benefits related to stock options.)

As you can see, InterDigital has a tendency to produce more free cash flow than net income. This means that the standard price-to-earnings multiple investors use to judge companies may overstate its price tag.

There can be a variety of reasons to disregard such a discrepancy; for example, free cash flow can overstate earnings in businesses with volatile working capital needs, or understate earnings in high growth companies that are reinvesting capital in the business.

Alternatively, in cases where free cash flow more accurately measures earnings, such a discrepancy can indicate a company that is more -- or less -- expensive than investors realize.

Let's examine InterDigital alongside some other companies from the communications equipment industry to gain some context. Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM  ) is the closest comparable as the company also licenses mobile technology. The other comparables give us a feel for ratios within the industry.

Company	Price-to-Earnings Ratio	Adjusted Price-to-Free-Cash-Flow Ratio
InterDigital	28.1	11.9
Qualcomm	19.8	19.6
Tekelec (Nasdaq: TKLC  )	N/A*	32.6
Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA  )	29.5	20.8

* Negative net income.

Like many of its communications-solutions peers, InterDigital appears to trade fairly expensively on the basis of its net income.

But InterDigital also tends to generate more free cash flow than net income, suggesting that the company's stock might be a bit cheaper than many investors realize.

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