All articles tagged with "Capital Allocation"
Meta's Family of Apps earns a 51.5% operating margin. Its ROIC is declining at -6.3 points per quarter. Both facts are true simultaneously. The gap between them reveals everything about the largest AI infrastructure bet in advertising history — and the accounting policies designed to make it look cheaper than it is.
Oracle's -$10B Q2 free cash flow triggered alarm bells. Decomposition reveals the collapse is 70% working capital timing, not structural deterioration. The real story: $248B in off-balance sheet lease commitments dwarfs their $100B balance sheet debt. This is the largest infrastructure bet in enterprise software history.
Yum Brands' shareholder equity is -$7.5 billion. Yet its ROIC is 50.8% - 2.2x McDonald's 22.8%. This isn't financial engineering. It's the byproduct of franchise economics: when a business doesn't need capital, it returns excess to shareholders. We break down the mechanism behind negative equity in asset-light models.
Companies spent $2.9 trillion on buybacks since 2019. But are they actually reducing shares? Our analysis reveals the uncomfortable truth that 95% of programs are ineffective.