Legendary fund manager Li Lu (who Charlie Munger backed) once said, ‘The biggest investment risk is not the volatility of prices, but whether you will suffer a permanent loss of capital.’ It’s only natural to consider a company’s balance sheet when you examine how risky it is, since debt is often involved when a business collapses. We note that Trimble Inc. (NASDAQ:TRMB) does have debt on its balance sheet. But should shareholders be worried about its use of debt?
Why Does Debt Bring Risk?
Debt and other liabilities become risky for a business when it cannot easily fulfill those obligations, either with free cash flow or by raising capital at an attractive price. Ultimately, if the company can’t fulfill its legal obligations to repay debt, shareholders could walk away with nothing. However, a more common (but still painful) scenario is that it has to raise new equity capital at a low price, thus permanently diluting shareholders. Of course, the upside of debt is that it often represents cheap capital, especially when it replaces dilution in a company with the ability to reinvest at high rates of return. When we examine debt levels, we first consider both cash and debt levels, together.
What Is Trimble’s Net Debt?
The image below, which you can click on for greater detail, shows that Trimble had debt of US$1.38b at the end of July 2021, a reduction from US$1.83b over a year. On the flip side, it has US$484.4m in cash leading to net debt of about US$897.0m.
A Look At Trimble’s Liabilities
We can see from the most recent balance sheet that Trimble had liabilities of US$1.17b falling due within a year, and liabilities of US$1.96b due beyond that. Offsetting this, it had US$484.4m in cash and US$583.2m in receivables that were due within 12 months. So it has liabilities totalling US$2.06b more than its cash and near-term receivables, combined.
Of course, Trimble has a titanic market capitalization of US$21.4b, so these liabilities are probably manageable. Having said that, it’s clear that we should continue to monitor its balance sheet, lest it change for the worse.
We use two main ratios to inform us about debt levels relative to earnings. The first is net debt divided by earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), while the second is how many times its earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) covers its interest expense (or its interest cover, for short). The advantage of this approach is that we take into account both the absolute quantum of debt (with net debt to EBITDA) and the actual interest expenses associated with that debt (with its interest cover ratio).
Trimble has net debt of just 1.2 times EBITDA, indicating that it is certainly not a reckless borrower. And it boasts interest cover of 7.8 times, which is more than adequate. Also positive, Trimble grew its EBIT by 29% in the last year, and that should make it easier to pay down debt, going forward. There’s no doubt that we learn most about debt from the balance sheet. But it is future earnings, more than anything, that will determine Trimble’s ability to maintain a healthy balance sheet going forward.
Finally, a company can only pay off debt with cold hard cash, not accounting profits. So we always check how much of that EBIT is translated into free cash flow. Over the last three years, Trimble actually produced more free cash flow than EBIT. There’s nothing better than incoming cash when it comes to staying in your lenders’ good graces.
Our View
Trimble’s conversion of EBIT to free cash flow suggests it can handle its debt as easily as Cristiano Ronaldo could score a goal against an under 14’s goalkeeper. And that’s just the beginning of the good news since its EBIT growth rate is also very heartening. Considering this range of factors, it seems to us that Trimble is quite prudent with its debt, and the risks seem well managed. So we’re not worried about the use of a little leverage on the balance sheet.