you are expected to select a company and three competitors from the same industry and prepare an analytical report in which you will critically evaluate, analyse, discuss and comment on the key issues in the financial appraisal. You can select a company f
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Assignment 1 outline
4 companies from same industry
Critically evaluate, analyse, discuss, comment on key issues in financial appraisal
Industry analysis
Financial statements / ratios for chosen companies
Financial health of company
Sample industry search –
Financial Performance - Industry Canada statistics
IBISWorld – Industry reports
Enter the name of the sector. Simple. Try it now.
Passport GMID – Industry reports and stats
More useful for consumer markets
Search by sector then sort by geography
Less intuitive than IBISWorld
There is a help guide
Mergent – company comparisons
Enter company name and look at competitors
Enter NAICS to locate company and then competitors
I only have time to talk about one tool in any depth, but I want to mention two others.
Find them all from the ‘market research’ guide under ‘Doing business’ link on the homepage.
Financial performance – enter industry name or partial naics code
IBIS is easy
Passport GMID is more awkward, more menu driven, but follow the prompts.
If keyword searches are not working, try the menus.
Remember that you will probably want to narrow by geography
Mergent is what I want to talk about
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Company comparisons - ratios
Use ‘Mergent Online’
Make sure to remember two things:
You can compare company financials and extract ratios from Mergent
There is a video to show you how in the Libguide
More than one path to Mergent, but I am going to show you this one:
Homepage ‘Doing business research’ ‘Industry Research’ ‘Finding international…’ Mergent.
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Mergent – 8 slides in case I am blocked from doing live demonstration
Company financials
There may be more than one result, but it is usually pretty easy to spot the version of the company you are looking for.
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Add company names if you know you are missing any.
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Click on this link right away. It’s easier to weed out unwanted companies on the next screen than it is here.
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Select the companies you want in the upper menu and push them over using the arrow button
Select the financial info and ratios you want and push them over as well
Top red circle is VERY important step
Current ratio
Long-term Debt/Equity
Net Profit margin
Operating margin
Total debt to equity
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Save the selected report
I am assuming you will want Excel, but you do have choices
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Final result