E-K_S - I am not sure, I'd call the Seekingalpha analysis compelling, I think it's in fact very superficially, like many articles in seekingalpa. The author did not dig into the balance sheet, products, prospects of the companies in question at all, just took some readily available numbers, scored them
LMT would be last on my shopping list, because of the higher debt load but more importantly the higher pension obligations, even normalized to the business volume or market cap.
GS pension obligation is ~10B$ gross (-7B$ in plan assets)= ~3B$ net. GD's pension spent in 2012: 400M$ (est)
LMT pension obligation is ~49B$ gross (-27B$ in plan assts)=13B$ net. LMT pension spent in 2012 (1.9B$ (est).
LMT has the higher dividend yield and dividend growth rate, that is true, but their earnings growth rates in the past and projected in the future are worse than GD by a bit. GD has a commercial aircraft business that is not affected by defense spending cuts and ramping nicely. For those reasons, I would pick GD over LMT.
I have not looked too closely at RTN today but have so in the past and I remember liking it better than LMT, although I have difficulties citing the reasons. |
