Capital expenditure to depreciation and amortisation

What it measures¶

Capital expenditure (capex) is what a company spent in the year on equipment, buildings and other long-lived assets. Depreciation and amortisation (D&A) is the yearly write-down of those assets as they wear out or age. The ratio divides the first by the second: is the company spending more on its asset base than that base is using up?

Why it is on the page¶

It is the capital-allocation panel's reading of investment. Spending well above depreciation means the asset base is growing; spending well below it for years means the business may be living off past investment.

Thresholds, their source and the population they were fitted on¶

No source agrees on a "steady state": mature companies are often quoted near 1.0, others near 1.5, and expanding ones between 1.5 and 3.0. So the product uses neutral words and never calls spending "maintenance" or "growth".

• Fitted on: no statistical sample.
• Evidence grade: practitioner convention.

Spending on acquisitions sits outside capex, so in the year after a large purchase the ratio understates investment while depreciation of the acquired assets rises.

A worked example¶

Celestica, as the Fundamentals page showed it on 9 August 2026 (fiscal year 2025): 1.15 — growing the base, below the Why paragraph's building line. Its capex had risen from 109 to 201 million US dollars between fiscal 2022 and 2025.

What “No verdict” means here¶

The row carries no verdict of its own; a cell the statements do not carry reads — (a dash), never 0. The ratio reads insufficient data when capex or D&A is not stored.

What the verdict is and is not¶

The figure describes one year's investment against the wear on existing assets. It is not a judgement of whether the investment will pay off, not a forecast, and not an instruction to trade the shares.