Cash Per Share: What it is, How it Works

What Is Cash Per Share?

Cash per share (CPS) measures how much cash a company has on hand on a per-share basis. It can also be expressed as a financial ratio that can be calculated by tallying up a company's total cash on its balance sheet, including easy to liquidate short-term investments, and then dividing that figure by the number of shares outstanding.

The cash per share indicates the amount of a company’s share price that's immediately available for spending on activities such as research and development (R&D), mergers and acquisitions (M&A), purchasing or improving assets, paying down debt, buying back shares, and making dividend payments to shareholders, etc.

Understanding Cash Per Share

Cash per share reveals how liquid a company’s assets are. This is money that a company has on hand, as opposed to money it may source from loans or other financing activities. High levels of cash per share suggest that a company is performing well. It reassures shareholders that there is enough of a financial cushion to cover any emergencies and that the company has adequate capital with which to reinvest in the business, return money to investors, or do both.

Interestingly, holding onto lots of cash isn’t always a positive indicator. Instead, it can sometimes signal a company's unwillingness to reinvest in its own operations due to unfavorable economic conditions. In other cases, it could suggest general management efficiencies. In any case, the act of hoarding cash rather than shrewdly spending it could mean missing out on opportunities. For example, tech giant Apple Inc. (AAPL) is routinely criticized for stockpiling cash. In theory, the company’s shareholders could earn a higher rate of return if that cash was put to proactive use.

Cash Per Share vs. Earnings Per Share (EPS)

Cash per share is often described as a significantly more reliable indicator of financial health than earnings per share (EPS), which measures a portion of a company’s profit that is allocated to each outstanding share of common stock. But although a high EPS may be tantalizing to investors, if too little revenues are transformed into liquid currency, a company's long-term success may be threatened. Furthermore, EPS figures are much easier to manipulate than cash.