Defense Contractors, Dividends, and Capex
Last week President Trump declared that U.S. defense contractors had to stop spending money on dividends and share buyback programs so that the companies could redirect that money to expanding the country’s defense base. Calcbench takes no view on the political or legal practicalities of such a move, but it did make us wonder — how much money are we talking about here, anyway? Thanks to our Bulk Data Query and Multi-Company pages, we quickly found the answer. Let’s start with six major defense contractors in the United States: RTX Corp. ($RTX) Lockheed Martin ($LMT) Northrop Grumman ($NOC) Huntington Ingalls ($HII) Leidos ($LDOS) General Dynamics ($GD) Using our Multi-Company page, we quickly found the amounts that each firm spent on capital expenditures, dividends, and share repurchases in 2024. See Figure 1, below. The amounts vary widely, depending on each firm’s overall size. Perhaps more important for financial analysis is to look at the relative spending among the t...