BF-BBrown-Forman Corporation
Is it safe?
Nothing alarming, nothing pristine: comfortable debt (A) and typical volatility.
Investment-grade balance sheet. A rule of thumb on leverage, not a credit rating.
Moderate price swings, typical volatility. Worst drawdown -69% · now 13% below its 52-week high.
Where this answer is blind. Altman sits structurally low for utilities and pipelines; Beneish runs high for fast growers, since sales growth alone lifts it; banks and REITs are excluded.
Can BF-B take a bad year?
Brown-Forman Corporation carries $2.14B of net debt at 1.97× EBITDA: a load its earnings can carry.
Net debt · as at Q1 2027 · under two and a half years of EBITDA, comfortable
- Net debt / EBITDA
- 1.97×
Net debt / EBITDA · 1.90× a year ago · the load is going up
- Interest cover
- 9.64×
Interest cover · operating profit covers the interest bill several times over
- Annualised volatility
- 39%
Annualised volatility · roughly twice as jumpy as the market
Details›
- Total debtQ1 2027
- $2.44B
- Cash and short-term investments
- $301M
- Net debt
- $2.14B
- EBITDA, trailing twelve months
- $1.09B
- Operating profit, trailing twelve months
- $993M
- Debt / equity
- 0.61×
- Total debt / EBITDA
- 2.25×
- Annualised volatilitytwo years of daily moves
- 39%
- Worst drawdown on file
- −69%
- Below its 52-week high
- 13%
Balance sheet from SEC filings; drawdown and volatility from end-of-day closes; Altman Z from the filed statements.