What General Electric Does With Its Cash

In the quest to find great investments, most investors focus on earnings to gauge a company's financial strength. This is a good start, but earnings can be misleading and incomplete. To get a clearer understanding of a company's ability to earn money and reward you, the shareholder, it's often better to focus on cash flow. In this series, we tear apart a company's cash flow statement to see how much money is truly being earned and, more importantly, what management is doing with that cash.

Step on up, General Electric (NYSE: GE).

The first step in analyzing cash flow is to look at net income. General Electric's net income over the last five years has been all over the place:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Next, we add back in a few non-cash expenses, like the depreciation of assets, and adjust net income for changes in inventory, accounts receivable, and accounts payable -- changes in cash levels that reflect a company either paying its bills, or being paid by customers. This yields a figure called "cash from operating activities" -- the amount of cash a company generates from doing everyday business.

From there, we subtract capital expenditures, or the amount a company spends acquiring or fixing physical assets. This yields one version of a figure called "free cash flow," or the true amount of cash a company has left over for its investors after doing business:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Now we know how much cash General Electric is really pulling in each year. Next question: What is it doing with that cash?

There are two ways a company can use free cash flow to directly reward shareholders: dividends and share repurchases. Cash not returned to shareholders can be stashed in the bank, invested in other companies and assets, or used to pay off debt.

Here's how much General Electric has returned to shareholders in recent years:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

As you can see, the company has repurchased a decent amount of its own stock. But combined with other rounds of share issuance, shares outstanding have actually increased:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Now, companies tend to be fairly poor at repurchasing their own shares, buying feverishly when shares are expensive and backing away when they're cheap. Does General Electric fall into this trap? Let's take a look:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Not good. GE bought back a lot of stock in 2007 when shares were flying high, but effectively none when shares came crashing down. This was mostly due to its financial arm, GE Capital, hemorrhaging losses during the recession, which caused the parent company to hoard cash to shore up its balance sheet. But the fact remains: By buying high and not having any spare cash once shares plunged, GE's buybacks ended up being a terrible deal for shareholders.

Finally, I like to look at how dividends have added to total shareholder returns:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Shares returned -29% over the last five years, which drops to -42% without dividends -- a nice boost to top off otherwise poor performance.

To gauge how well a company is doing, keep an eye on the cash. How much a company earns is not as important as how much cash is actually coming in the door, and how much cash is coming in the door isn't as important as what management actually does with that cash. Remember, you, the shareholder, own the company. Are you happy with the way management has used General Electric's cash? Sound off in the comment section below.

Add General Electric to My Watchlist.