The Coca-Cola Company: would “debt to equity stays at or below 1.0” have held?

It would have broken in 10 years of 10: FY2016, FY2017, FY2018, FY2019, FY2020, FY2021, FY2022, FY2023, FY2024, FY2025.

Tested against The Coca-Cola Company (KO, NYSE) as the company filed it: debt to equity in each fiscal year, recomputed from the annual statements, compared against 1.0. Nothing here is a forecast. Every verdict is about a document that has already been filed.

Year by year, against the filings

Debt to equity stays at or below 1.0, tested against every fiscal year of The Coca-Cola Company on file. Each row names the submission the figure was read from.
Fiscal yearDebt to equityAgainst 1.0FiledSubmission
FY20161.96broke2017-02-24 10-K0000021344-17-000009 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20172.50broke2018-02-23 10-K0000021344-18-000008 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20182.28broke2019-02-21 10-K0000021344-19-000014 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20192.09broke2020-02-24 10-K0000021344-20-000006 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20202.09broke2021-02-25 10-K0000021344-21-000008 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20211.78broke2022-02-22 10-K0000021344-22-000009 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20221.57broke2023-02-21 10-K0000021344-23-000011 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20231.57broke2024-02-20 10-K0000021344-24-000009 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20241.72broke2025-02-20 10-K0000021344-25-000011 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
FY20251.38broke2026-02-20 10-K0001628280-26-010047 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)

10 of the 10 filed fiscal years could be tested. A year the figure is missing from counts as neither held nor broken, which is what the nightly check does with the same gap: a missing number is a condition of the data, not evidence about the company.

Where 1.0 comes from

Graham, The Intelligent Investor (revised edition, 1973), chapter 14, defensive-investor criteria.

The threshold is the reader's to choose. This page reports what this particular one would have done, and says so in the past tense because that is all a filed document can support. It is not a view on The Coca-Cola Company and it is not a recommendation.

What this page leaves out

Evaluated over 10 filed fiscal years, FY2016 to FY2025. Accounts filed before this company began tagging its statements in XBRL are not machine-readable and are outside this page. No share price is involved in any figure here, so nothing on this page is limited by the depth of our price archive.

Figures on this page are recomputed from statements filed with the SEC, and each row names the submission it came from. Filings can be mis-tagged upstream and companies restate, so check a number against the filing before you rely on it. To find out whether a company you own can be answered this way at all, use the coverage checker.

Related

Ask it about your own company

This page is one threshold on one company, chosen by us. The same question, on the company you own and at the number you would actually use, is one form away and needs no account: open this question in the retro-test tool and change either half of it.

The product behind both is the same test run every night on the rules you write for the companies you own, against the newest filed data, and one email on the day a rule stops holding. Silence when nothing breaks.

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