Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT): Does It Pass Warren Buffett’s Test?

We’d all like to invest like the legendary Warren Buffett, turning thousands into millions or more. Buffett analyzes companies by calculating return on invested capital, or ROIC, to help determine whether a company has an economic moat — the ability to earn returns on its money above that money’s cost.

In this series, we examine several companies in a single industry to determine their ROIC. Let’s take a look at Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) and three of its industry peers, to see how efficiently they use cash.

Of course, it’s not the only metric in value investing, but ROIC may be the most important one. By determining a company’s ROIC, you can see how well it’s using the cash you entrust to it and whether it’s actually creating value for you. Simply put, it divides a company’s operating profit by how much investment it took to get that profit. The formula is:

ROIC = net operating profit after taxes / Invested capital

(Get further detail on the nuances of the formula.)

This one-size-fits-all calculation cuts out many of the legal accounting tricks (such as excessive debt) that managers use to boost earnings numbers, and it provides you with an apples-to-apples way to evaluate businesses, even across industries. The higher the ROIC, the more efficiently the company uses capital.

Ultimately, we’re looking for companies that can invest their money at rates that are higher than the cost of capital, which for most businesses is between 8% and 12%. Ideally, we want to see ROIC above 12%, at a minimum, and a history of increasing returns, or at least steady returns, which indicate some durability to the company’s economic moat.

Here are the ROIC figures for Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT) and three industry peers over a few periods.

Source: S&P Capital IQ. TTM=trailing 12 months.

Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE:LMT), Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman all offer returns on invested capital in the low 12% range. Lockheed’s returns have pretty consistently declined over the five-year period, and are more than six percentage points lower than they were five years ago. While Raytheon’s returns are currently higher than they were five years ago, they have gradually declined over the past three years. Northrop Grumman’s returns on invested capital are lower than they were last year, they have increased by five percentage points from five years ago.

General Dynamics has negative returns on invested capital in the last year, due to some tax accounting that saw its effective tax rate balloon to 160% rather than a more typical 31-32%. Normalize that tax rate, and ROIC comes out to 11.1%, still down from last year but much better and above what it did three and five years ago.