Calcbench

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...

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman ($NOC) filed its second-quarter earnings release on Tuesday, which gives us yet another chance to indulge in our favorite hobby — segment-level financial analysis! In this instance, we wanted to look at order backlog. We’ve written previously about order backlog at defense contractors , comparing numbers among Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and RTX Corp. Today we wanted to focus specifically on funded versus unfunded backlog.  As defined by Northrop, funded backlog represents firm orders for which an entity has authorized and appropriated funding; unfunded backlog are those orders that have been placed, but funding hasn’t yet been appropriated.  Backlog is a valuable detail to know, since it helps analysts understand a defense contractor’s long-term revenue pipeline and the possible risks to it. Hence Northrop discloses its backlog by operating segment — but you do have to look for it; the information is tucked away on Page 14 of the...