2月22日，全球第五大食品公司卡夫亨氏宣布減記154億美元資產(chǎn)，其股價(jià)和聲譽(yù)也因此遭到重創(chuàng)。不過，與食品和飲料行業(yè)的其他競(jìng)爭(zhēng)對(duì)手相比，卡夫亨氏的業(yè)績(jī)表現(xiàn)究竟有多差呢？

對(duì)于這個(gè)問題，最好的衡量指標(biāo)是經(jīng)濟(jì)增加值（EVA）。數(shù)據(jù)顯示，在過去三年間，卡夫亨氏的EVA以令人震驚的速度惡化。（無獨(dú)有偶，卡夫亨氏的股價(jià)也比2017年2月時(shí)的最高值下跌了約三分之二。）

2013年，來自于巴西的3G資本攜手巴菲特的伯克希爾-哈撒韋公司收購(gòu)了卡夫。為了達(dá)到傳說中的效率，以及為行業(yè)設(shè)立一個(gè)新標(biāo)桿，他們又主導(dǎo)了卡夫與亨氏的并購(gòu)。2015年，卡夫完成了對(duì)亨氏的收購(gòu)。接下來的兩年里，華爾街對(duì)3G資本主導(dǎo)的這次并購(gòu)吹捧得無以復(fù)加。

然而所謂的“3G療法”，卻讓這家番茄醬生產(chǎn)廠商付出了血的代價(jià)。

EVA暴露了什么問題

EVA是衡量一家公司能否通過股東投資獲取足夠利潤(rùn)，進(jìn)而回饋股東的一個(gè)最基本的指標(biāo)。它最早是由企業(yè)管理與分析領(lǐng)域的權(quán)威機(jī)構(gòu)ISS提出的。EVA的基本理念是，除非一家公司產(chǎn)生的回報(bào)高于股東將這筆投資用于另一個(gè)高風(fēng)險(xiǎn)項(xiàng)目的回報(bào)，否則這家公司就不算真正的盈利?；谶@一理念，在計(jì)算利潤(rùn)時(shí)，EVA會(huì)從投資收益中扣除代表“機(jī)會(huì)成本”的“資本支出”。

當(dāng)調(diào)整后的稅后利益高于資本支出時(shí)，EVA為正數(shù)，代表企業(yè)給投資者帶來了回報(bào)。當(dāng)EVA為負(fù)數(shù)時(shí)，則代表企業(yè)在生產(chǎn)、研發(fā)、資本運(yùn)營(yíng)上表現(xiàn)不佳，缺乏競(jìng)爭(zhēng)力，無法有效產(chǎn)生利潤(rùn)。（EVA對(duì)計(jì)算運(yùn)營(yíng)利潤(rùn)的傳統(tǒng)會(huì)計(jì)方法進(jìn)行了調(diào)整，包括對(duì)研發(fā)成本、營(yíng)銷成本、重組成本的資本化與攤銷等。）

如果一家公司的EVA勉強(qiáng)為正，則說明它的業(yè)績(jī)表現(xiàn)勉強(qiáng)可以接受，大致相當(dāng)于一名職業(yè)高爾夫球手打出了18洞標(biāo)準(zhǔn)桿的成績(jī)。

在計(jì)算EVA指標(biāo)時(shí)，我們對(duì)卡夫亨氏總數(shù)為1120億美元的股權(quán)和債務(wù)取5%作為資本支出，扣出資本支出后的收益為其實(shí)際經(jīng)濟(jì)收入。2016年是卡夫亨氏并購(gòu)后的第一個(gè)完整的經(jīng)營(yíng)年度，當(dāng)年卡夫亨氏很輕松地跑贏了資本支出，其EVA盈余3.05億美元，約等于其銷售額的1.1%。到2018年，它的經(jīng)濟(jì)利潤(rùn)已經(jīng)跌至負(fù)6.05億美元，下跌幅達(dá)9.1億美元，達(dá)到營(yíng)收入的負(fù)2.3%。從2015年也就是公司業(yè)績(jī)還算強(qiáng)勁時(shí)算起，以EVA占銷售額的百分比為指標(biāo)來衡量，業(yè)內(nèi)比卡夫亨氏業(yè)績(jī)更差的企業(yè)只有六分之一。

導(dǎo)致崩潰的三個(gè)關(guān)鍵因素

卡夫亨氏的EVA之所以下跌得如此厲害，主要受三個(gè)負(fù)面因素的共同作用。

一是增收乏力。從2016年年末到2018年年末，卡夫亨氏的營(yíng)收入下降了近5億美元，跌至260億美元出頭，跌幅達(dá)1.7%。一方面，卡夫亨氏要面對(duì)來自于在線零售商的激烈競(jìng)爭(zhēng)；而在線下，它的卡夫芝士等拳頭產(chǎn)品也面臨著競(jìng)品的激烈的價(jià)格戰(zhàn)。在最近接受CNBC采訪時(shí)，巴菲特坦承，卡夫亨氏高估了自己的品牌實(shí)力，并認(rèn)為卡夫亨氏拒絕大零售商們提出的降價(jià)要求是錯(cuò)誤的做法。巴菲特表示：“我們并不像自己想象的那么強(qiáng)大?！?/p>

盡管如此，如果卡夫亨氏能保證銷售額不下滑，并且將成本控制在相同水平，那么它去年仍然會(huì)產(chǎn)生可觀的EVA。削減成本本應(yīng)該是3G資本的強(qiáng)項(xiàng)，它雖然一定程度上也削減了成本，但做得還不夠。

二是成本削減被利潤(rùn)下滑所抵消。2015到2018年，卡夫亨氏的銷售和行政管理成本從10%下降到8%，這也就是3G資本所謂的“零基數(shù)預(yù)算法”的成果——即各部門的每一筆預(yù)算都要每年從零開列，并且必須有合理理由。然而成本的下降并不能抵消毛利潤(rùn)的顯著下滑。從2017年年初到2018年年底，公司毛利率（營(yíng)收入減去銷售成本）由39.5%下跌至36%，跌幅達(dá)3.5個(gè)百分點(diǎn)。

原因有兩方面。首先，許多產(chǎn)品的生產(chǎn)成本大幅上升了。比如據(jù)管理層介紹，公司在一種名叫Capri Sun的鮮果飲料的生產(chǎn)上投入了大量資本。為了針對(duì)大型商超做好線下推廣，去年該產(chǎn)品的銷售人員的人數(shù)增長(zhǎng)了80%。其次，據(jù)最早提出EVA理念的ISS高級(jí)顧問貝內(nèi)特·斯圖爾特觀察：“卡夫亨氏很多產(chǎn)品的盈利能力較弱?！彪m然卡夫亨氏一直努力維持產(chǎn)品定價(jià)，但隨著克羅格和沃爾瑪?shù)却笮途€下零售商紛紛推出自有食品品牌，在巨大的競(jìng)爭(zhēng)壓力下，卡夫亨氏目前的折扣力度已經(jīng)比兩年前大得多了。在接受CNBC采訪時(shí)，巴菲特也提到它的“議價(jià)能力較弱”。

簡(jiǎn)而言之，毛利率3.5%的跌幅超過了管理成本2%的跌幅，使得卡夫亨氏的虧損率達(dá)到了銷售額的1.5%。管理費(fèi)用的下跌是以研發(fā)、廣告和促銷支出的下降為代價(jià)的，而這些都對(duì)促進(jìn)銷量至關(guān)重要。從2015年年底到去年年底，卡夫亨氏的研發(fā)成本、廣告成本和促銷成本總計(jì)減少了8400萬美元，下跌幅度超過10%，管理費(fèi)用縮支的半數(shù)都來自于此。

三是資本支出巨大卻沒有回報(bào)。在2015年，卡夫亨氏每賣出1美元的產(chǎn)品，就會(huì)向不動(dòng)產(chǎn)、工廠、設(shè)備等固定資產(chǎn)投資32美分。去年，這個(gè)數(shù)字上升到了41美分，漲幅達(dá)32%。也就是說，為了升級(jí)那些用了幾十年的老舊廠房，卡夫亨氏是頗下了血本的。

據(jù)卡夫亨氏的管理層透露，該公司的業(yè)務(wù)還受到了發(fā)貨延遲問題的影響，因此，公司覺得有必要斥巨資升級(jí)其供應(yīng)鏈和倉(cāng)庫網(wǎng)絡(luò)。對(duì)此，斯圖爾特認(rèn)為：“然而卡夫亨氏未能通過降低成本和提高利潤(rùn)等手段收回全部投資?！苯Y(jié)果是，它的投資效率遠(yuǎn)不如幾年前了。2015年，卡夫亨氏每進(jìn)行1每元的固定資產(chǎn)投資，就能收獲3.5美元的銷售額，但現(xiàn)在這個(gè)數(shù)字已經(jīng)下降到了2.5美元。

價(jià)值貶損200億美元

要衡量投資者從一家公司獲得多少回報(bào)，或者損失了多少，還有另一個(gè)終極指標(biāo)——市場(chǎng)增加值（MVA）。MVA是EVA的一個(gè)變種，衡量的是投資者投入的股本與其當(dāng)前市場(chǎng)價(jià)值的差額。斯圖爾特表示：“簡(jiǎn)單說來，就是投入的現(xiàn)金與產(chǎn)生的價(jià)值的對(duì)比。MVA會(huì)告訴你，在股東投入到公司的股本的基礎(chǔ)上，究竟產(chǎn)生了多少財(cái)富。”

到2016年年中，也就是3G資本正受到華爾街熱捧的時(shí)候，卡夫亨氏的市值大約超過其賬面資本500億美元，這就是它為股東創(chuàng)造的累計(jì)財(cái)富。而現(xiàn)在，由于股價(jià)下跌得很厲害，加之投資還沒有收到回報(bào)，卡夫亨氏的MVA已經(jīng)是負(fù)200億美元了。MVA的崩潰也是EVA下跌的必然反應(yīng)。在這段時(shí)期里，卡夫亨氏的股東損失的價(jià)值要超過任何一家包裝食品公司。

3G資本在削減成本方面有一些好點(diǎn)子，但在如何推動(dòng)卡夫亨氏的增長(zhǎng)上，卻沒有什么良策。對(duì)于3G資本來說，如果你不能推動(dòng)公司核心業(yè)務(wù)也就是包裝食品的增長(zhǎng)，那么最后你只得花更多的錢來避免公司的進(jìn)一步衰落。（財(cái)富中文網(wǎng)）

譯者：樸成奎

The shares and reputation of Kraft Heinz took a huge hit when the world’s fifth largest food company announced a $15.4 billion writedown on February 22. But how badly is Kraft Heinz really doing compared to rivals in the food and beverage industry?

The best yardstick is a metric called Economic Value Added (or EVA). And the EVA numbers show an absolutely shocking deterioration over the past three years. (Not coincidentally, shares in Kraft Heinz are down about two-thirds since their February 2017 peak.)

In 2015, Kraft bought Heinz. And over the next couple of years, Wall Street cheered 3G, the Brazilian investment firm that had teamed up with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to buy Kraft in 2013 and then engineered the Heinz acquisition, for achieving unheard-of efficiencies, and setting a new standard that rivals would need to rush to match. (Read “Buy. Squeeze. Repeat.

But what was advertised as the 3G cure has cost the ketchup-maker a lot of blood since then.

What “EVA” reveals

EVA is the most basic measure of whether a company is earning sufficient profits on the capital invested by shareholders to truly reward those owners. It’s a trademark and service of ISS, a global leader in corporate governance and analytics. The idea behind EVA is that a company isn’t really profitable unless it’s generating returns greater than what a shareholder could garner from another, equally risky investment. Hence, EVA deducts a “capital charge” from reported earnings on all of the billions backing the business––representing the “opportunity cost” of what that capital could be earning elsewhere.

When the adjusted, after-tax profits exceed the capital charge, EVA is positive, and the enterprise is rewarding investors. When it’s negative, the company’s operations are underperforming, uncompetitive, and killing shareholder value by doing a poor job of deploying investments in plants, R&D and working capital to generate profits. (EVA makes adjustments to traditional accounting to calculate operating profit, including capitalizing and amortizing R&D, marketing and restructuring costs.)

When a company beats the EVA bogey, it’s meeting the minimum requirement for adequate performance––just as, when a professional golfer shoots par, they’ve hit the benchmark for a decent 18 holes.

The ISS EVA methodology assess a 5% capital charge on all of Kraft Heinz’s $112 billion in combined equity and debt. What Heinz earns after subtracting that charge amounts to its real economic earnings. In 2016, the first full year following the Kraft-Heinz merger, the maker of Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Kraft cheese beat its cost of capital handily, and in the process, generated a positive $305 million in EVA, equal to 1.1% of sales. But by 2018, economic profit dropped to a minus $605 million, a swing of $910 million, to -2.3% of revenues. From the period starting in 2015, when EVA was also strongly positive, only one in six U.S. food and beverage companies performed worse, measured by the 3-year trend of EVA as a share of sales.

Three keys to a collapse

Kraft Heinz’s EVA went the wrong way due to a confluence of three negatives.

Kraft Heinz couldn’t grow the top line. From the close of 2016 to the end of last year, Kraft Heinz’s revenues fell by almost $500 million, or 1.7%, to just over $26 billion. Kraft Heinz faced stiff competition from online retailers and heavily discounted in-store brands that share space with such signature offerings as Kraft cheese slices. In a recent CNBC interview, Buffett acknowledged that the company overestimated the strength of its brands, and misfired by strongly resisting the big retailers’ demands for lower prices. “We weren’t as strong as we thought,” Buffett declared.

Still, if Heinz even managed to hold sales constant and kept costs the same, it would have generated respectable EVA last year. Pounding down expenses was supposed to be 3G’s strength. It did so lower costs to extent, but not enough.

Cost-cutting got swamped by falling margins. From 2015 through 2018, Kraft Heinz lowered its sales, general and administrative costs (SG&A) from 10% to 8% of sales. That’s the payoff from 3G’s vaunted “zero based budgeting” program that demands that managers justify every expense, starting from scratch, each year. A steep fall in gross margins, however, overwhelmed the progress on overhead. From the start of 2017 through the end of 2018, that figure––consisting of revenues minus cost of good sold––fell by 3.5 percentage points, from 39.5% to 36%.

The reason is two-fold. First, production costs on many products seem to have risen significantly. For example, management states that it spent heavily on producing a fresh version of its fruit drink Capri Sun. The in-store sales force for that product in the U.S. rose by 80% last year in a campaign to boost shelf space with big retailers. Second, “Kraft Heinz appears to be garnering smaller markups on many of its products,” says Bennett Stewart, a senior advisor to ISS who pioneered the EVA concept. Despite its efforts to preserve pricing, the pressure from house brands at big grocery retailers such as Kroger and Wal-Mart forced Kraft to offer far deeper discounts than the deals it had offered two years ago. On CNBC, Buffett referred to its “weaker bargaining hand.”

In short, the 3.5% fall in gross margins exceeded the 2% shrinkage in overhead, leaving Kraft worse off by 1.5% of sales. And the decline in overhead came at the expense of R&D and advertising plus promotional spending, categories crucial to boosting sales. In total, outlays in those two categories fell by $84 million, or over 10%, from the end to 2015 through last year, accounting for roughly half the savings in SG&A.

Big spending on capex, but no returns. In 2015, Kraft Heinz was deploying 32 cents for every dollar in sales in property, plant and equipment (PP&E) assets on its balance sheet, using it to make everything from Velveeta to Mac & Cheese to Miracle Whip. Last year, that number rose to 41 cents, a gigantic jump of 32%. Kraft spent heavily to revitalize decades-old plants churning out those venerable brands.

Management has also disclosed that business suffered from shipment delays, necessitating big expenditures to upgrade its supply chain and warehouse network. “But Kraft failed to recoup all of that investment by being able to lower costs and hence improve margins,” says Stewart. The upshot is that It’s now deploying capital a lot less efficiently than a few years ago. Today, it’s garnering $2.50 in sales for every dollar invested in PP&E, down from $3.50 in 2015.

A $20 billion shortfall

The ultimate measure of how richly a company rewards investors, or how badly it penalizes them, is Market Value-Added (MVA), an EVA offshoot that measures the spread between the equity investors have put into the business, and its current market value. “It’s money in versus value out,” says Stewart. “MVA tells you how much wealth is created over and above what shareholder put into the company.”

By the middle of 2016, when Wall Street was touting the genius of 3G, Kraft Heinz was trading at market value premium to its book capital on the order of $50 billion, representing the cumulative of wealth created for shareholders. Now, the company’s MVA is far in the red at a negative $20 billion, due to the big drop in the stock price, as well as investments that haven’t paid off. It’s the swoon in EVA, the relentless fall in profits after subtracting the charge for capital, that accounts for the collapse in MVA. No surprise that Kraft Heinz has destroyed more shareholder value than any other packaged goods company over that time frame.

3G had good ideas for cutting, but not for growing. And if you can’t grow in old-line packaged goods, you end up spending more just to keep from falling further behind.