LONDON -- Many investors focus on earnings per share when judging a company's performance. However, earnings can be manipulated and adjusted in all sorts of ways, meaning they don't tell you a lot about how much spare cash a company has generated. Similarly, since dividend cover is calculated using earnings, a good level of dividend cover doesn't necessarily mean the payout is actually being funded from a company's profits.
A company's cash flow can tell you a lot about a firm's financial health. Is the company burning up its cash reserves on interest payments and operating expenses, or does it generate spare cash that can fund dividends or be retained for future investment? If a dividend isn't funded by cash flow, then there is a greater chance the payout will become unaffordable and be cut, which is bad news for shareholders like you and me.
In this series, I'm going to take a look at the cash flow statements of some of the biggest names in the FTSE 100 (UKX) to see whether their dividends are being funded in a sustainable way, from genuine spare cash. Today, I'm looking at Tesco (TSCO 0.98%) (TSCDY 1.57%).
Tesco's troubled year
This has not been a good year for Tesco. In January it was forced to issue a profit warning, sending its share price down by 22% in just a few days. For most of the year, its sales results have lagged behind those of Morrisons and Sainsbury. Tesco has also had to face up to slowing growth in its Asian and Eastern European stores.
However, there are signs that Tesco is turning things around -- in its last quarterly update, it moved ahead of Morrisons in terms of sales growth and also announced the disposal of its loss-making U.S. operation, Fresh & Easy.
Does Tesco have enough cash?
As private investors, we want to back businesses that are able to pay their dividends out of free cash flow each year. I define free cash flow as the cash that's left over after capital expenditure, interest payments and tax deductions. With that in mind, let's look at Tesco's cash flow from the last five years:
| Year | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free cash flow (in millions of pounds) | 389 | -2,014 | 2,868 | 2,366 | 1,225 |
| Dividend payments (in millions of pounds) | 794 | 886 | 970 | 1,083 | 1,183 |
| Free cash flow/dividend* | 0.5 | -2.3 | 3.0 | 2.2 | 1.0 |
Source: Morningstar, Reuters, Tesco annual reports. *A value of >1 means the dividend was covered by free cash flow.
Is Tesco's dividend safe?
Tesco's cash flow has been quite badly stretched over the last five years, but I think that by disposing of its U.S. business and focusing on improving its existing U.K. stores, Tesco should be able to reverse the decline in its UK sales and improve its cash flow. I'm also quite keen on the growing income from Tesco Bank; personal finance products tend to provide much higher profit margins than food, and Tesco reported an operating margin of 18.3% for Tesco Bank in its most recent interim results, compared to 5.2% for its U.K. supermarket operations. I think that Tesco will manage to avoid cutting its dividend, but any dividend growth is likely to be pretty minimal for the next couple of years, while the company's turnaround plans work through the system and start to deliver results.
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