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, Choice Hotels
The first step in analyzing cash flow is to look at net income. Choice Hotels' net income over the last five years has been all over the place:
|
2011 |
2010 |
2009 |
2008 |
2007 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normalized Net Income |
$104 million |
$101 million |
$98 million |
$115 million |
$111 million |
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:
|
2011 |
2010 |
2009 |
2008 |
2007 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free Cash Flow |
$124 million |
$121 million |
$101 million |
$92 million |
$134 million |
Source: S&P Capital IQ.
Now we know how much cash Choice Hotels 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 to pay off debt.
Here's how much Choice Hotels has returned to shareholders in recent years:
|
2011 |
2010 |
2009 |
2008 |
2007 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dividends |
$44 million |
$44 million |
$44 million |
$43 million |
$40 million |
| Share Repurchases |
$54 million |
$11 million |
$59 million |
$64 million |
$186 million |
| Total Returned To Shareholders |
$97 million |
$55 million |
$103 million |
$107 million |
$226 million |
Source: S&P Capital IQ.
As you can see, the company has repurchased a decent amount of its own stock. That's caused shares outstanding to fall:
|
2011 |
2010 |
2009 |
2008 |
2007 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shares Outstanding (millions) |
59 |
59 |
60 |
62 |
64 |
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 Choice Hotels fall into this trap? Let's take a look:
Source: S&P Capital IQ.
Not bad. Choice Hotels' buybacks over the last five years have been sporadic, but it doesn't look like market swings have influenced management's buyback behavior in a negative way. That's what you want to see. Given reasonable valuations, these buybacks have likely been a decent deal for shareholders.
Finally, I like to look at how dividends have added to total shareholder returns:
Source: S&P Capital IQ.
Shares returned -1% over the last five years, which increases to 10% with dividends reinvested -- a nice boost to top off otherwise low 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 Choice Hotels' cash? Sound off in the comment section below.
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