Forensic Analysis · General / Diversified · as of Aug 11, 2026
Aes Corp (AES)
A forensic read on Aes Corp built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.
F · Poor — capital at risk
Forensic grade
Distress
Financial health
0.0
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
6
Forensic signals
7.8
P / E (ttm)
22.4%
ROE
$10.5B
Market cap
4.79%
Dividend yield
-0.4%
Revenue growth
This free snapshot doesn't read filing or proxy text, so the auditor-quality and governance checks that can lower a grade were not evaluated (red flags, auditor quality, say on pay, board independence). Those checks only ever lower a grade, so the full analysis can land below the grade above but never above it — treat it as the most favourable reading, not the settled one.
Aes Corp earns an F (Poor — capital at risk) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads 0.0, placing it in the Distress zone. 6 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by accruals ratio (% of noa).
What the filings flag
+23.4%
FY2024→FY2025
Accruals ratio (% of NOA).Net operating assets grew +23.4% relative to their own average in FY2025 — scaled by NOA itself, not total assets (see the Forensic Screens card's differently-scaled Sloan Accrual Ratio for that read). Accruals are building sharply — a large slice of profit sits in operating assets, not cash; Richardson/Sloan link high accruals to weaker future returns as they reverse. The build is led by PP&E up +14% against revenue -0%. The cash-flow cross-check is more mixed: reported earnings ran behind operating cash by 141% of net operating assets, diverging from the balance-sheet accrual read.
3.2%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is 3.2% in the latest fiscal year and steady — well below its ~9% cost of capital, so reinvested dollars may be destroying value, not building it.
+2.2%/yr
FY2022–FY2025
Share-count dilution.Diluted share count changed +7% over the last 3 years to FY2025 (+2.2%/yr). A change of direction: the count shrank over the full period (net -0.7%/yr since FY2011) but has grown across the recent window, so the two figures point opposite ways — read the recent window on totals versus per-share, since the full-period rate no longer describes what the count is doing now. That's ~2.2% shaved off per-share growth every year — total profit has to grow that much just to keep earnings-per-share flat, and a stake held since FY2022 has been diluted ~6%.
FCF ($1.6B)
FY2025
Shareholder returns.Returned $501M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2025, but free cash flow was ($1.6B) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, though operating cash flow alone was $4.3B — 12% of that. The entire return is coming from debt or cash reserves, not cash the business itself generated — a harder case than returns merely running ahead of free cash flow, since here there was none to run ahead of.
Key fundamentals
Latest Revenue$12.23B
Revenue Growth YoY-0.4%
Revenue CAGR (3yr)-1.0%
Net Margin7.4%
Free Cash Flow-$1.62B
Return on Equity22.4%
The forensic grade and screens above are free — no account needed. Want the AI investment read on top — the 0–100 rating, thesis, bull-vs-bear, red flags and the 12-month scenario, written from Aes Corp's actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?
Stock-based comp load.Stock-based compensation ran 0.1% of revenue in FY2025 — about $0.02 per diluted share. The cost of it is not in the cash flow — no cash left the business — it is in the count, and there it has run at about 2.3% a year and is falling.
$789M
FY2022–FY2023
Goodwill impairments.Took $789M of goodwill writedowns across 2 years (FY2022 ($777M), FY2023 ($12M)). Writedowns mean past acquisitions underperformed what was paid for them.