Maintenance capital expenditure
The part of capital spending needed simply to keep the business running at its current scale: replacing equipment, repairs, sustaining capacity.
How to read the number
Splitting capex into maintenance and growth answers how much cash the company can hand to shareholders without shrinking.
When the metric lies
The accounts contain no such split: it comes from management's presentation or from an analyst's estimate, and cannot be checked against reported lines.
Also known as: maintenance capex