Until now the case for corporate stock buybacks has rested far more on faith than data. Whenever a company seems to lack better opportunities, its CEO or CFO will be pressured by investors to buy back stock, or will anticipate such demands by announcing a buyback program, on the assumption that reducing the supply of outstanding shares will send the stock price up. And that it often does. But are buybacks always the best allocation of shareholder capital? Absolutely not, a new study of buybacks shows.
In fact, return measurements that are typically applied to capital expenditures, mergers angod acquisitions and virtually every other use of corporate capital are rarely used to measure the value of buybacks, even though they consume equal or greater amounts of corporate capital.
The prevailing wisdom in favor of them has rested on one or more of the following rationales: 1) Buybacks provide management with the flexibility to cash in gains or leave capital invested; 2) The tax consequences of the alternative for returning capital to shareholders — dividends — are onerous; and 3) Buybacks automatically produce higher earnings per share (although this is purely a mathematical, non-operating result and overlooks the increase in risk that the leverage accompanying the reduction in equity may consequently produce).
However, actual measures that analyze the returns or losses that buybacks generate on invested capital are rarely marshalled as evidence to back up such claims. “Buybacks are probably the least analyzed tangible event that companies spend so much money on,” says Jim Morrow, Fidelity Research Equity Income Fund portfolio manager. “There’s a lot of room to illuminate the effectiveness of buybacks.” ....