What are examples of companies with too much cash relative to market cap, to the point of hurting its stock potential?

I recently wrote a comment about the shareholder 'revolution' that is starting to emerge in Japan. Japanese companies are notorious for sitting on mountains of cash; they don't do large buybacks or dividends that let shareholders invest elsewhere, nor do they invest in projects with ROI. Let me quote some snippets (recommend reading the whole comment):

What's odd about Japanese corporations is that despite decent profitability, albeit generally lower than that of the S&P 500, they don't reward shareholders with that profitability. As a consequence, "The average Topix company has a staggeringly high 50 per cent equity-to-assets ratio, according to JPMorgan." Japanese companies hold on to an enormous amount of cash, broken down into nominal figures here. They have been earnings large interest income as a consequence: "2022’s second quarter was three times the recent quarterly average, or roughly 35 per cent (!) of operating income." They hold levels of cash at about 13 times their operating income. [I would greatly appreciate someone providing the equivalent facts for US stocks--so we can see just how extreme these figures are]

Ethan Wu (Unhedged author) puts it this way:

From a US shareholder value perspective, Japanese companies are in the peculiar position of having done the hard stuff, such as raising underlying profitability, but struggling with the easy stuff, like returning those profits to shareholders

I'm interested in examples of other companies where having a healthy balance sheet is hindering potential shareholder value.

In theory, having too much cash means you are vulnerable to takeovers: the acquiring company can use that cash to pay off the debts from its acquisition costs. It also means either there are limited options to grow, or if there are options to grow, the cash pile simply grows at the risk-free rate while the rest of the business thrives. This reflects management improperly using their capital.

I'll give an example of a company that is disappointing me in this fashion. A coal mining company, Peabody Energy (BTU), has recently negotiated its way into being able to return capital to shareholders, by getting released from some restrictions it incurred following some past debt issues. But instead the company is deciding to sit on some 900M in cash (its market cap is 3.3B...). So we aren't getting shareholder returns, nor is the company going to do capex (thankfully banks won't lend to it).

On the other hand, having an excess of cash is seeing as fiscal prudence, especially as the cost of borrowing has risen. There is a balance, of course. Does Google/Apple/etc. hold on to too much cash or are they smartly holding onto dry powder for the right opportunity?


What are your examples?

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Created 2y | May 13, 2023, 6:20:55 AM


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