SID

National Steel

Materials · fiscal year ending 2009-12-31

Through the investors’ lenses

1 of 4 cleared4 of 7 criteria

Each of these investors has said in public what they look at before buying. Click a name to see how this company measures up — a tick where it passes one of their tests, a cross where it does not.

Warren Buffett 2/3

Measure	SID	Checked against
Owner earnings	$8.00m	positive	✓
Return on equity	30.0%	US median 2.8%	✓
Debt to equity	1.72x	US median 0.57x	✗
Operating margin	—	US median 3.1%	—

Passes 2 of 3. These are the measures Warren Buffett published, applied to National Steel’s own figures — their criteria, not their view of this company. What he looks at, and why →

Benjamin Graham 1/2

Measure	SID	Checked against
Current ratio	3.27x	2.00x published	✓
Long-term debt to working capital	1.54x	1.00x published	✗

Passes 1 of 2. These are the measures Benjamin Graham published, applied to National Steel’s own figures — their criteria, not their view of this company. What he looks at, and why →

Joel Greenblatt 1/1

Measure	SID	Checked against
Return on capital employed	10.0%	US median 5.1%	✓

Passes 1 of 1. These are the measures Joel Greenblatt published, applied to National Steel’s own figures — their criteria, not their view of this company. What he looks at, and why →

Peter Lynch 0/1

Measure	SID	Checked against
Debt to equity	1.72x	US median 0.57x	✗
Net margin	—	US median 2.0%	—

Passes 0 of 1. These are the measures Peter Lynch published, applied to National Steel’s own figures — their criteria, not their view of this company. What he looks at, and why →

Last usable year: 2009-12-31 — 202 months ago. Nothing filed since gives the figures a payout ratio needs. For a company that once paid, that usually means it stopped.

Basis	Payout	Why
GAAP earnings	94.2%	why A single year's earnings for a commodity producer can be several times the through-cycle average. This ratio computed in a trough looks alarming and in a peak looks trivial; neither describes whether the dividend is affordable across a cycle.
Free cash flow	negative	why OCF fell $890m short of capex — the dividend was not funded from free cash flow.

No operating cash flow figure is shown. This company does not report the inputs for it in its XBRL filings — capital expenditure, in particular, is often folded into a single investing total rather than tagged on its own. The figure is absent from the filings, not zero, and inventing one from a balance-sheet movement would be a guess dressed as a measurement.

Nothing is marked as applying, deliberately. The basis that governs here is free cash flow, and this year it yields no ratio at all. The figure above is shown for completeness; treating it as the answer is the substitution this page exists to prevent.

The arithmetic

GAAP earnings — dividends declared per share $0.810 ÷ diluted EPS $0.860
Free cash flow — dividends paid $1,208,887m ÷ (operating cash flow $40.0m − capex $930m)

Where the figures came from

20-F filed 2010-06-01 · accession 0001292814-10-001853

Every one is public at sec.gov and free to check. That is the point — you should not have to take our word for any of it.

Caveats on this company

dividends paid derived as $0.81 x 1,492,453m shares = $1,208,887m; no total was filed
basis discarded as outside the sane band (distribution far larger than the year's income — usually a special dividend or a return of capital, not a payout ratio): ocf

Computed by an open pipeline reading SEC XBRL directly. If any number here looks wrong to you, tell us — that is more useful to us than agreement.

Also on: when it files.

Who else looks like this

Every figure above is computed from National Steel’s own filing, and every company here is measured the same way. Screen all of them on any of these twelve measures, or on the rules four investors published — free, and nothing you screen leaves your browser.

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