Price/Earnings multiples of major companies in the past (1998) and now

Since quite a while I have been reading a book about security valuation: “Security Analyses on Wall Street: a comprehensive guide to today’s valuation methods” by J.C. Hooke. While the content is quite outdated now, it still provides a good overview and some insight. After all methods didn’t change too much.

However there was a table with P/E multiples from several major companies, many of which today still exist. Since some analysts often emphasis the historical cheapness when comparing historical to today’s multiples.

Name	1998	31.05.2012	%
Coca-Cola	43	20	47%
Procter&Gamble	24	19	79%
Sara Lee	19	35	184%
Cadbury-Schweppes	14	aquired by Kraft
Grand Metropolitan	15	merged with guiness to Diageo (23 P/E)
Kirin	35	143	409%
Unilever	18	17	94%
LVMH	25	19	76%
Nestle	18	15	83%

Of course this is only a little snapshot, however we can see that for most companies this is true, however not on a very big scale (except coca-cola).