Margins matter. The more Hillshire Brands (NYSE: HSH) keeps of each buck it earns in revenue, the more money it has to invest in growth, fund new strategic plans, or (gasp!) distribute to shareholders. Healthy margins often separate pretenders from the best stocks in the market. That's why we check up on margins at least once a quarter in this series. I'm looking for the absolute numbers, so I can compare them to current and potential competitors, and any trend that may tell me how strong Hillshire Brands's competitive position could be.

Here's the current margin snapshot for Hillshire Brands over the trailing 12 months: Gross margin is 28.4%, while operating margin is 8.2% and net margin is 20.6%.

Unfortunately, a look at the most recent numbers doesn't tell us much about where Hillshire Brands has been, or where it's going. A company with rising gross and operating margins often fuels its growth by increasing demand for its products. If it sells more units while keeping costs in check, its profitability increases. Conversely, a company with gross margins that inch downward over time is often losing out to competition, and possibly engaging in a race to the bottom on prices. If it can't make up for this problem by cutting costs -- and most companies can't -- then both the business and its shares face a decidedly bleak outlook.

Of course, over the short term, the kind of economic shocks we recently experienced can drastically affect a company's profitability. That's why I like to look at five fiscal years' worth of margins, along with the results for the trailing 12 months, the last fiscal year, and last fiscal quarter (LFQ). You can't always reach a hard conclusion about your company's health, but you can better understand what to expect, and what to watch.

Here's the margin picture for Hillshire Brands over the past few years.

Source: S&P Capital IQ. Dollar amounts in millions. FY = fiscal year. TTM = trailing 12 months.

Because of seasonality in some businesses, the numbers for the last period on the right -- the TTM figures -- aren't always comparable to the FY results preceding them. Here's how the stats break down:

  • Over the past five years, gross margin peaked at 36.0% and averaged 31.7%. Operating margin peaked at 8.2% and averaged 7.4%. Net margin peaked at 31.4% and averaged 13.7%.
  • TTM gross margin is 28.4%, 330 basis points worse than the five-year average. TTM operating margin is 8.2%, 80 basis points better than the five-year average. TTM net margin is 20.6%, 690 basis points better than the five-year average.

With recent TTM operating margins exceeding historical averages, Hillshire Brands looks like it is doing fine.