Should You Care About EON SE’s (FRA:EOAN) Cash Levels?
If you are currently a shareholder in EON SE (FRA:EOAN), or considering investing in the stock, you need to examine how the business generates cash, and how it is reinvested. This difference directly flows down to how much the stock is worth. Operating in the industry, EOAN is currently valued at €20b. I will take you through EOAN’s cash flow health and the risk-return concept based on the stock’s cash flow yield, using the most recent financial data. This will help you think about the company from a cash perspective, which is a crucial factor to investing.
View our latest analysis for E.ON
Is E.ON generating enough cash?
Free cash flow (FCF) is the amount of cash E.ON has left after it pays off its expenses, including its net capital expenditures, which is what the company needs to spend each year to maintain or grow its business operations.
I will be analysing E.ON’s FCF by looking at its FCF yield and its operating cash flow growth. The yield will tell us whether the stock is generating enough cash to compensate for the risk investors take on by holding a single stock, which I will compare to the market index. The growth will proxy for sustainability levels of this cash generation.
Free Cash Flow = Operating Cash Flows – Net Capital Expenditure
Free Cash Flow Yield = Free Cash Flow / Enterprise Value
where Enterprise Value = Market Capitalisation + Net Debt
After accounting for capital expenses required to run the business, E.ON is not able to generate positive FCF, leading to a negative FCF yield – not very useful for interpretation!
Is E.ON’s yield sustainable?
E.ON’s FCF may be negative today, but is operating cash flows expected to improve in the future? Let’s examine the cash flow trend the company is anticipated to produce over time. In the next few years, the company is expected to grow its cash from operations at a double-digit rate of 34%, ramping up from its current levels of €2.9b to €3.9b in three years’ time. Although this seems impressive, breaking down into year-on-year growth rates, EOAN’s operating cash flow growth is expected to decline from a rate of 17% in the upcoming year, to 6.7% by the end of the third year. But the overall future outlook seems buoyant if EOAN can maintain its levels of capital expenditure as well.
Next Steps:
Keep in mind that cash is only one aspect of investment analysis and there are other important fundamentals to assess. You should continue to research E.ON to get a better picture of the company by looking at:
Valuation: What is EOAN worth today? Is the stock undervalued, even when its growth outlook is factored into its intrinsic value? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether EOAN is currently mispriced by the market.
Management Team: An experienced management team on the helm increases our confidence in the business – take a look at who sits on E.ON’s board and the CEO’s back ground.
Other High-Performing Stocks: If you believe you should cushion your portfolio with something less risky, scroll through our free list of these great stocks here.
To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
