digitalwanderer said:
Could you please try explaining that again using very little words like you're trying to explain it to a child who's a bit of a thicky?
I REALLY suck with financial stuff, but I want to understand this.
I guess this is like you guys trying to explain pixel shaders to me
OK. Look at Russ' links to biz.yahoo. Both ATI and NV have a quoted "debt/equity" number - 0.36 for NV and 0.04 for ATI.
This ratio is the amount of debt they have divided by the equity. In this case I am assuming that "equity" is equal to the market capitalisation (as at now), also found on those pages.
Doing the maths, for example for NV, they have a market capitalisation of $3.07bln. As I said, let's call this equity. So if
Debt/Equity = 0.36
then
Debt = Equity * 0.36 = 3.07 * 0.36 = $1.1bln or so.
Doing the same for ATI gives them a debt level of 2.74*0.04 = $0.1 bln.
Now both companies also have cash (like you might have a loan from the bank, but also cash in your current account at the same time) - so to find the "net" position as at the last quarter (27 Apr for NV and 31 May for ATI - so these numbers are all a bit out of date anyway) - we take the debt from the cash.
So NV has $1.05bln cash, giving them a "net debt" of $50mln.
ATI has $280mln cash, giving them a "net cash" of $180mln or thereabouts.
These numbers are both relatively small compared to the respective market capitalisations, and so IMHO all the discussion regarding "cash piles" and whether you should take them off mkt cap or not is rather academic.
Please don't draw any direct conclusions from these net figures I have calculated either, as there are some rather crass assumptions in there, and anyway the "real" position depends a lot on the precise financial structure of these companies, of which I know very little. Also it is remarkably easy to manipulate debt and cash levels for the quarter end balance sheet date (it's a lot harder to actually do it right though) - you might have 200mln cash the day before q/e, 50mln cash on q/e, and 200mln again the day after. And the 50 is the only number that you would put in your balance sheet. Of course in no way am I suggesting that either NV or ATI are doing any sort of "balance sheet manipulation". Seriously I'm not.
Gnep