What Packaging Corp. of America 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, Packaging Corp. of America (NYSE: PKG).                                                                                    

The first step in analyzing cash flow is to look at net income. Packaging Corp. of America's net income over the past 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 Packaging Corp. of America 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, used to invest in other companies and assets, or used to pay off debt.

Here's how much Packaging Corp. of America has returned to shareholders in recent years:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

The company has repurchased a decent amount of its own stock. That's caused shares outstanding to fall:

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 Packaging Corp. of America fall into this trap? Let's take a look:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Sure enough, Packaging Corp. of America repurchased a lot of its stock in 2007 and 2008, when shares were fairly high, stopped its buying in late 2008 and 2009, after they had plunged during the financial crisis, and came back with buybacks after shares rebounded. Whether this was a prudent way to save cash as it looked like the economy was about to implode or a classic example of buying high and panicking low is up for debate. In general, it doesn't appear management has been the most astute buyer of its own stock.

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

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Shares returned 10% over the past five years, which increases to 33% with dividends reinvested -- a nice boost to top off otherwise tepid 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 Packaging Corp. of America's cash? Sound off in the comments section below.

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