The difficulty for anyone trying to analyze or write about General Electric (NYSE:GE) is that you really can't boil this company's quarterly performance down into a page or two and do the company much justice. It's simply too big.
With that said, here are my few paragraphs on GE's recently reported first-quarter results. They are by no means the entire story, but they are the items I found most interesting. If you're seriously interested in GE, I recommend heading over to its investor-relations site and digging through the presentation and supplemental material that accompanies the earnings release.
At the very top of the list is revenue growth. For a company of GE's size, revenue growth of 10% (9% organically) is impressive, and the growth was consistent across most of the company's segments. The next item that caught my eye is that earnings from continuing operations were up 14% and that cash flow from operating activities from the industrial businesses rose 24%. For the entire business, cash flow from operating activities was up 132%, but that number is a bit misleading, because it includes $2.5 billion from the sale of GenworthFinancial (NYSE:GNW). Back that out, and the total is $4.2 billion, which is still a 45% improvement in operating cash flow from last year's $2.9 billion.
Moving on to free cash flow, I estimate that GE delivered $3.3 billion of the green stuff after paying for its capital-expenditure needs. That $3.3 billion figure is based on the normalized $4.2 billion in operating cash flow minus $0.9 billion in capital expenditures. Of course, the $2.5 billion from the Genworth sale is real cash that the company can employ, which it largely did, toward $3 billion in share repurchases, but the $4.2 billion figure is closer to the recurring operating cash flow that GE's business is capable of.
Compared with other large industrial companies in the Dow such as United Technologies (NYSE:UTX), Honeywell (NYSE:HON), and Inside Value selection 3M (NYSE:MMM), GE is valued attractively. In addition, GE still maintains a solid balance sheet, and with its cash flow, it should have no problem supporting its debt and expansion needs.
A few months ago, I encouraged against investing in GE primarily because of its sheer size, and I felt that the double-digit growth expectations being talked up at the time were too high over a long period of time, such as five years. I thought waiting for a P/E of 15 and/or a dividend yield at 3% would be a better bet. If you use the forward P/E as your marker, both are in place now, but I'm still not running out to buy GE shares for my own account because I see many smaller companies that I think offer better long-term rewards from a valuation perspective and over a decade could double or triple in size -- something I think will be quite difficult for GE to pull off. Still, for some investors, GE may be the more attractive route, because its valuation is reasonable, and, if I had to guess, I would say the shares are likely to be pretty stable, whereas some of the smaller companies I am interested in are likely to be quite volatile. It all depends on what you think best suits your portfolio.
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Nathan Parmelee has no financial interest in any of the companies mentioned. The Motley Fool has an ironclad disclosure policy.
