Lockheed Martin Corp. is a defense company that uses its capital to generate profits most efficiently as compared to its peers; however, the year-over-year growth of this specific metric has been tepid.
What Happened: A company’s capital efficiency, or how profitable a company is with the capital it has put to use, is measured by ROCE or Return on Capital Employed.
When a company demonstrates consistently growing ROCE, it signals its ability to be a compounding machine, skillfully reinvesting profits back into the business for increasingly higher returns.
In the case of defense stocks, Lockheed Martin has the highest ROCE among its peers, representing the management’s effectiveness in deploying capital for productive use.
As of the quarter ending March, LMT had an ROCE of 25.71%, higher than 22.97% from the same quarter of the previous year, highlights GuruFocus data.
As the year-over-year expansion was minimal, it might not be a super high-growth stock; however, Lockheed Martin’s solid 25.71% return on capital shows it’s running a really efficient business.
That strong performance probably explains why Lockheed Martin is a high-yielding stock and has a history of consistent dividend increases, with the current dividend yield at 2.85%, according to Benzinga.
Here is a list of a few other defense stocks with their current ROCE.
| U.S. Defense Stocks | ROCE |
| Palantir Technologies Inc. PLTR | 12.67%. |
| General Dynamics Corp. GD | 13.37% |
| Northrop Grumman Corp. NOC | 8.42% |
| Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT | 25.71%. |
| Boeing Co. BA | 5.59% |
| RTX Corp. RTX | 8.80% |
| General Electric Co. GE | 11.04% |
Why It Matters: Despite the high quality of the capital efficiency metric, Lockheed Martin stock has performed the worst among the given peers.
It has declined by over 4% in 2025 and is just above the flatline over a year. On the other hand, Palantir Technologies Inc. PLTR remains the stock with the highest returns among its peers.
| U.S. Defense Stocks | YTD Performance | One Year Performance |
| Palantir Technologies Inc. | 78.69% | 385.05% |
| General Dynamics Corp. | 12.93% | 5.10% |
| Northrop Grumman Corp. | 7.73% | 17.19% |
| Lockheed Martin Corp. | -4.09% | 0.16% |
| Boeing Co. | 25.63% | 16.19% |
| RTX Corp. | 25.64% | 45.60% |
| General Electric Co. GE | 46.44% | 50.97% |
Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings shows that LMT had a stronger price trend over the medium term and a weaker trend over the short and long term. Its momentum ranking was moderate, and its value ranking was poor at the 31.60th percentile. The details of other metrics are available here.
On the truncated trading day of July 3rd, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY and Invesco QQQ Trust ETF QQQ, which track the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq 100 index, respectively, scaled fresh records and ended higher. The SPY was up 0.79% at $625.34, while the QQQ advanced 0.98% to $556.22, according to Benzinga Pro data.
On Monday, the futures of the S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq 100 indices were trading lower.
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