MGMT

Financial Ratio Analysis

It is difficult to infer organizational perfor​mance from one or two simple numbers.  Nevertheless, in practice a num​ber of different ratios are often calculated in strategic planning endeavors and, taken as a whole and with some caution, these ratios do provide some information about the relative performance of an organization.  In particu​lar, a careful analysis of a combination of these ratios may help you to dis​tinguish between firms that will eventually fail and those that will continue to survive.  Evidence suggests that, as early as five years before a firm fails, one may be able to detect trouble from the value of these financial ratios.1

            In this note, the basic financial ratios are reviewed, and some of the caveats associated with using them are highlighted.  The ratios tend to be most meaningful when they are used to compare organizations within the same broad industry, or when they are used to make inferences about changes in a particular organization's structure over time.

LIQUIDITY RATIOS

In order to survive, firms must be able to meet their short-term obligations​—pay their creditors and repay their short-term debts.  Thus, the liquidity of the firm is one measure of a firm's financial health.  Two measures of liq​uidity are in common:

Current ratio = current assets / current liabilities

  Quick ratio  = (cash + marketable securities + net receivables) / current liabilities

            The main difference between the current ratio and the quick ratio is that the latter does not include inventories, while the former does.

            Which ratio is a better measure of a firm's short-term position?  In some ways, the quick ratio is a more conservative standard.  If the quick ratio is greater than one, there would seem to be no danger that the firm would not be able to meet its current obligations.  If the quick ratio is less than one, but the current ratio is considerably above one, the status of the firm is more complex.  In this case, the valuation of inventories and the inventory turnover are obviously critical.

            A number of problems with inventory valuation can contaminate the current ratio.  An obvious accounting problem occurs because organizations value inventories using either of two methods, last in, first out (LIFO) or first in, first out (FIFO).  Under the LIFO method, inventories are valued at their old costs.  If the organization has a substantial quantity of inventory, some of it may be carried at relatively low cost, assuming some inflation in overall prices.  On the other hand, if there has been technical progress in a market and prices have been falling, the LIFO method will lead to an over​valued inventory.  Under the FIFO method of inventory valuation, invento​ries are valued at close to their current replacement cost.  Clearly, if we have firms that differ in their accounting methods, and hold substantial invento​ries, comparisons of current ratios will not be very helpful in measuring their relative strength, unless accounting differences are adjusted for in the com​putations.

            A second problem with including inventories in the current ratio derives from the difference between the inventory's accounting value, how​ever calculated, and its economic value.  A simple example is a firm subject to business-cycle fluctuations.  For a firm of this sort, inventories will typically build during a downturn.  The posted market price for the inventoried prod​uct will often not fall very much during this period; nevertheless, the firm finds it cannot sell very much of its inventoried product at the so-called mar​ket price.  The growing inventory is carried at the posted price, but there re​ally is no way that the firm could liquidate that inventory in order to meet current obligations.  Thus, including inventories in current assets will tend to understate the precarious financial position of firms suffering inventory buildup during downturns.

            Might we then conclude that the quick ratio is always to be preferred?  Probably not.  If we ignore inventories, firms with readily marketable inven​tories, appropriately valued, will be undeservedly penalized.  Clearly, some judicious further investigation of the marketability of the inventories would be helpful.

            Low values for the current or quick ratios suggest that a firm may have difficulty meeting current obligations.  Low values, however, are not always fatal.  If an organization has good long-term prospects, it may be able to en​ter the capital market and borrow against those prospects to meet current obligations.  The nature of the business itself might also allow it to operate with a current ratio less than one.  For example, in an operation like Mc​Donald's, inventory turns over much more rapidly than the accounts payable become due.  This timing difference can also allow a firm to operate with a low current ratio.  Finally, to the extent that the current and quick ratios are helpful indexes of a firm's financial health, they act strictly as signals of trou​ble at extreme rates.  Some liquidity is useful for an organization, but a very high current ratio might suggest that the firm is sitting around with a lot of cash because it lacks the managerial acumen to put those resources to work.  Very low liquidity, on the other hand, is also problematic.

LEVERAGE

Firms are financed by some combination o£ debt and equity.  The right cap​ital structure will depend on tax policy—high corporate rates favor debt, high personal tax rates favor equity—on bankruptcy costs, and on overall corporate risk.  In particular, if we are concerned about bankruptcy possi​bilities, the long-run solvency or leverage of the firm may be important.  There are two commonly used measures of leverage, the debt-to-assets ratio and the debt-equity ratio;

            Debt-to-asset ratio = total liabilities / total assets

              Debt-equity ratio = long-term debt / shareholder's equity

            As with liquidity measures, problems in measurement and interpreta​tion also occur in leverage measures.  The central problem is that assets and equity are typically measured in terms of the carrying (book) value in the firm's financial statements.  This figure, however, often has very little to do with the market value of the firm, or the value that creditors could receive were the firm liquidated.

            Debt-to-equity ratios vary considerably across industries, in large mea​sure due to other characteristics of the industry and its environment.  A util​ity, for example, which is a stable business, can comfortably operate with a relatively high debt-equity ratio.  A more cyclical business, like manufactur​ing of recreational vehicles, typically needs a lower D/E—a reminder that cross-industry comparisons of these ratios is typically not very helpful.

            Often, analysts look at the debt-equity ratio to determine the ability of an organization to generate new funds from the capital market.  An organi​zation with considerable debt is often thought to have little new-financing capacity.  Of course, the overall financing capacity of an organization prob​ably has as much to do with the quality of the new product the organiza​tion wishes to pursue as with its financial structure.  Nevertheless, given the threat of bankruptcy and the attendant costs, a very high debt-equity ratio may make future financing difficult.  It has been argued, for example, that railroads in the 1970s found it hard to find funds for new investments in piggybacking, a large technical improvement in railroading, because the threat of bankruptcy from prior poor investments was so high.

RATES OF RETURN

            There are two measures of profitability common in the financial com​munity, return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE).

                        ROA = net income / total average assets

                        ROE = net income / total stockholders equity

            Assets and equity, as used in these two common indexes, are both mea​sured in terms of book value.  Thus, if assets were acquired some time ago at a low price, the current performance of the organization may be over​stated by the use of historically valued denominators.  As a result, the ac​counting returns for any investment generally do not correlate well with the true economic internal rate of return for that investment.

            Difficulties with using either ROA and ROE as a performance measure can be seen in merger transactions.  Suppose we have an organization that has been earning a net income of $500 on assets with a book value of $1000, for a hefty ROA of 50 percent.  That organization is now acquired by a sec​ond firm, which then moves the new assets onto its books at the acquisition price, assuming the acquisition is treated using the purchase method of ac​counting.  Of course, the acquisition price will be considerably above the $1,000 book value of assets, for the potential acquirer will have to pay hand​somely for the privilege of earning $500 on a regular basis.  Suppose the ac​quirer pays $2,000 for the assets.  After the acquisition, it will appear that the returns of the acquired firm have fallen.  The firm continues to earn $500, but the asset base is now $2,000, so the ROA is reduced to 25 percent.  Indeed, the ROA may be less as a result of other factors, such as increased de​preciation of the newly acquired assets.  Yet in fact nothing has happened to the earnings of the firm.  All that has changed is its accounting, not its perfor​mance.

            Another fundamental problem with ROA and ROE measures comes from the tendency of analysts to focus on performance in single years, years that may be idiosyncratic.  At a minimum, one should examine these ratios averaging over a number of years to isolate idiosyncratic returns and try to find patterns in the data.

STOCK MARKET RATIOS

Several ratios are calculated not from the income statements and balance sheets of organizations, but from data associated with their stock market performance.  The three most common ratios are earnings per share (EPS), the price-earnings ratio (P/E), and the dividend-yield ratio:

                             EPS = (net income - preferred dividends) /

                                         common shares outstanding

                               P/E = market price per share / earnings per share

            Dividend yield = annual dividends / price per share

            EPS is one of the most widely used statistics.  Indeed, it is required to be given in the income statements of publicly traded firms.  As we can see, the ratio tells us how much the firm has earned per share of stock outstanding.  As it turns out, this is not generally a very helpful statistic.  It says nothing about how many assets a firm used to generate those earnings, and hence nothing about profitability.  Nor does it tell us how much the individual stockholder has paid per share for the rights over that annual earning.  Fur​ther, accounting practices in the calculation of earnings may distort these ra​tios.  And finally, the treatment of inventories is again problematic.

            The P/E is another ratio commonly cited.  Indeed, P/Es are reported in daily newspapers.  A high P/E tends to indicate that investors believe the future prospects of the firm are better than its current performance.  They are in some sense paying more per share than the firm's current earnings warrant.  Again, earnings are treated differently in different accounting prac​tices.

            Finally, from the perspective of some stockholders at least, dividend pol​icy may be important.  The dividend-yield ratio tells us how much of its earn​ings the firm pays out in dividends versus reinvestment.  Rapidly growing firms in new areas tend to have low dividend-yield ratios; more mature firms tend to have higher ratios.

SUMMARY

In this note, we have briefly reviewed a variety of ratios commonly used in strategic planning.  All of these ratios are subject to manipulation through opportunistic accounting practices.  Nevertheless, taken as a group and used judiciously, they may help to identify firms or business units in particular trouble.  Finding profitable new ventures requires rather more work.

Adapted from

http://www.nd.edu/~mgrecon/simulations/micromaticweb/financialratios.html

Ratio Analysis- Why So Important for Business Strategic Planning

Ratio Analysis is one of the basic tools of financial analysis. And it is a fact that financial analysis itself plays an important role in the progress of business strategic planning. Being the basic tool of the strategic analysis, ratio analysis plays a vital role and it is not possible to complete the analysis of a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, without an analysis of its financial position.

This tool is normally used to conduct a quantitative analysis of information in a company’s financial statements. Ratios are calculated by comparing the current year figures to previous years, other companies, the industry, or even the economy to judge the performance of the company. This is predominately used by proponents of fundamental analysis. If you don’t know how to evaluate the present performance of a company and its possible future performance, you should learn how to analyze ratios.

Types of Ratios used for Business Strategic Planning</STRONG< p>

Different types of ratios can be calculated from the financial statements pertaining to a company’s activity, performance liquidity and financing. When it comes to investing, ratio analysis is one of the most important element in the fundamental analysis process. Among the dozens of ratios available, the most relevant ratios are categorized into six major heads, which are-

• Liquidity Measurement Ratios: - Liquidity ratio is calculated by comparing a company’s most liquid assets. The greater the coverage of liquid assets to short-term liabilities, the better as it is a clear signal that a company can pay its debts that are coming due in the near future.

• Profitability Indicator Ratios:- This discusses the different measures of corporate profitability and financial performance.

• Debt Ratios:- These ratios give users a general idea of the company’s overall debt load.

• Operating Performance Ratios:- These ratios look at how well a company turns its assets into revenue as well as how efficiently a company converts its sales into cash.

• Cash Flow Indicator Ratios:- These ratios can give users another look at the financial health and performance of a company.

• Investment Valuation Ratios:- These ratios can be used by investors to estimate the attractiveness of a potential or existing investment and get an idea of its valuation.

Why Ratio Analysis is so important?

Ratio Analysis, being the basic tool of the strategic analysis, is extremely important for an organization to carry out its business planning. Some of the key reasons why it holds so much of importance are -

• This analysis gives users a good understanding of how well the company utilized its resources in generating profit and shareholder value.

• It attempts to measure a company’s ability to pay off its short-term debt obligations.

• Used to determine the overall level of financial risk a company and its shareholders face.

• It helps to enrich financial health and performance of a company.

How much debt a business has on its balance sheet? This is an important consideration when it comes to assessing financial health of a firm. Leverage ratios disclose to what an extent debt is used in a firm’s capital structure. It is believed that the more debt a firm has in its capital structure, the riskier its stock becomes. The underlying reason for this is that debtors have a priority or first claim to a firm’s assets and if ever, the firm went bankrupt, debtor’s claims must be paid off before stockholders (who are party to business risk and owners of the firm).

Debt/Equity Ratio

D/E or debt/equity ratio is an indicator of the debt financing in a business as compared to stockholder equity (finance by its owners/shareholders).

The formula for Debt/Equity Ratio

Debt/Equity Ratio = (Short-Term Debt + Long-Term Debt) / Total Equity

A high debt/equity ratio is an indicator of high risk business and a low debt/equity ratio, if other factors are similar, is deemed to mean that the business is less riskier than those with higher debt/equity ratio. However, one should not jump to the conclusion that debt is an evil and a low debt/equity ratio is an indicator of splendid financial management. Low debt/equity ratio may also indicate that a business is not using financial leverage to enhance its profitability.

How? One is prompted to ask….

Very briefly, the cost of debt is ‘fixed’ while that of equity is not – shareholders have a claim on the profits through dividends. It is also important to note that ‘fixed’ doesn’t necessarily mean high cost and that is where financial leverage comes into play – by optimizing its capital structure on debt as well as equity, a business actually ends up paying out less as a composite of dividends and interest.

Another factor that is to be remembered is that comparison of debt/equity ratios should generally be done among businesses within the same industry as higher debt/equity ratios are generally observed in capital-intensive industries.

It is imperative for a business owner to be ‘on top of things’ and constantly evaluate the performance of the business, irrespective of the size of the business – it could be a small printing business or a mammoth multi-product conglomerate. Business performance, though it may seem great in absolute terms, always has subjectivity involved and it is crucial to compare it industry competitors & established industry benchmarks. It is here that financial ratio analysis comes in handy. The purpose of this post is to introduce the subject of financial analysis to small businesses, entrepreneurs and young managers, especially the significance of financial ratios.

What is financial ratio analysis?

Financial ratio analysis is the selection, evaluation and interpretation of financial data in easier to understand ratios, which have been identified as critical indicators of financial performance of the business and can be used for strategy and decision-making. Financial ratio analysis is popularly used to compare a firm’s financial performance over a period of time (trend analysis) or to assess performance in comparison to other businesses.

Categories of financial ratios

Financial ratios can be grouped into categories which highlight the various facets of a firm’s financial health and operational efficiency. Some of the categories of ratios are given below:

• Leverage Ratios disclose to what extent debt is used in a firm’s capital structure. • Liquidity Ratios present a firm’s short term financial situation or solvency. • Operational Ratios present a firm’s operational efficiency & asset utilization. • Profitability Ratios indicate the return on sales and capital employed. • Solvency Ratios measure a firm’s ability to generate cash flow and honor its financial obligations.

Source

http://www.fintel.us/blog/?cat=11

Financial Ratio Analysis

It is difficult to infer organizational perfor​mance from one or two simple numbers.  Nevertheless, in practice a num​ber of different ratios are often calculated in strategic planning endeavors and, taken as a whole and with some caution, these ratios do provide some information about the relative performance of an organization.  In particu​lar, a careful analysis of a combination of these ratios may help you to dis​tinguish between firms that will eventually fail and those that will continue to survive.  Evidence suggests that, as early as five years before a firm fails, one may be able to detect trouble from the value of these financial ratios.1

            In this note, the basic financial ratios are reviewed, and some of the caveats associated with using them are highlighted.  The ratios tend to be most meaningful when they are used to compare organizations within the same broad industry, or when they are used to make inferences about changes in a particular organization's structure over time.

LIQUIDITY RATIOS

In order to survive, firms must be able to meet their short-term obligations​—pay their creditors and repay their short-term debts.  Thus, the liquidity of the firm is one measure of a firm's financial health.  Two measures of liq​uidity are in common:

Current ratio = current assets / current liabilities

  Quick ratio  = (cash + marketable securities + net receivables) / current liabilities

            The main difference between the current ratio and the quick ratio is that the latter does not include inventories, while the former does.

            Which ratio is a better measure of a firm's short-term position?  In some ways, the quick ratio is a more conservative standard.  If the quick ratio is greater than one, there would seem to be no danger that the firm would not be able to meet its current obligations.  If the quick ratio is less than one, but the current ratio is considerably above one, the status of the firm is more complex.  In this case, the valuation of inventories and the inventory turnover are obviously critical.

            A number of problems with inventory valuation can contaminate the current ratio.  An obvious accounting problem occurs because organizations value inventories using either of two methods, last in, first out (LIFO) or first in, first out (FIFO).  Under the LIFO method, inventories are valued at their old costs.  If the organization has a substantial quantity of inventory, some of it may be carried at relatively low cost, assuming some inflation in overall prices.  On the other hand, if there has been technical progress in a market and prices have been falling, the LIFO method will lead to an over​valued inventory.  Under the FIFO method of inventory valuation, invento​ries are valued at close to their current replacement cost.  Clearly, if we have firms that differ in their accounting methods, and hold substantial invento​ries, comparisons of current ratios will not be very helpful in measuring their relative strength, unless accounting differences are adjusted for in the com​putations.

            A second problem with including inventories in the current ratio derives from the difference between the inventory's accounting value, how​ever calculated, and its economic value.  A simple example is a firm subject to business-cycle fluctuations.  For a firm of this sort, inventories will typically build during a downturn.  The posted market price for the inventoried prod​uct will often not fall very much during this period; nevertheless, the firm finds it cannot sell very much of its inventoried product at the so-called mar​ket price.  The growing inventory is carried at the posted price, but there re​ally is no way that the firm could liquidate that inventory in order to meet current obligations.  Thus, including inventories in current assets will tend to understate the precarious financial position of firms suffering inventory buildup during downturns.

            Might we then conclude that the quick ratio is always to be preferred?  Probably not.  If we ignore inventories, firms with readily marketable inven​tories, appropriately valued, will be undeservedly penalized.  Clearly, some judicious further investigation of the marketability of the inventories would be helpful.

            Low values for the current or quick ratios suggest that a firm may have difficulty meeting current obligations.  Low values, however, are not always fatal.  If an organization has good long-term prospects, it may be able to en​ter the capital market and borrow against those prospects to meet current obligations.  The nature of the business itself might also allow it to operate with a current ratio less than one.  For example, in an operation like Mc​Donald's, inventory turns over much more rapidly than the accounts payable become due.  This timing difference can also allow a firm to operate with a low current ratio.  Finally, to the extent that the current and quick ratios are helpful indexes of a firm's financial health, they act strictly as signals of trou​ble at extreme rates.  Some liquidity is useful for an organization, but a very high current ratio might suggest that the firm is sitting around with a lot of cash because it lacks the managerial acumen to put those resources to work.  Very low liquidity, on the other hand, is also problematic.

LEVERAGE

Firms are financed by some combination o£ debt and equity.  The right cap​ital structure will depend on tax policy—high corporate rates favor debt, high personal tax rates favor equity—on bankruptcy costs, and on overall corporate risk.  In particular, if we are concerned about bankruptcy possi​bilities, the long-run solvency or leverage of the firm may be important.  There are two commonly used measures of leverage, the debt-to-assets ratio and the debt-equity ratio;

            Debt-to-asset ratio = total liabilities / total assets

              Debt-equity ratio = long-term debt / shareholder's equity

            As with liquidity measures, problems in measurement and interpreta​tion also occur in leverage measures.  The central problem is that assets and equity are typically measured in terms of the carrying (book) value in the firm's financial statements.  This figure, however, often has very little to do with the market value of the firm, or the value that creditors could receive were the firm liquidated.

            Debt-to-equity ratios vary considerably across industries, in large mea​sure due to other characteristics of the industry and its environment.  A util​ity, for example, which is a stable business, can comfortably operate with a relatively high debt-equity ratio.  A more cyclical business, like manufactur​ing of recreational vehicles, typically needs a lower D/E—a reminder that cross-industry comparisons of these ratios is typically not very helpful.

            Often, analysts look at the debt-equity ratio to determine the ability of an organization to generate new funds from the capital market.  An organi​zation with considerable debt is often thought to have little new-financing capacity.  Of course, the overall financing capacity of an organization prob​ably has as much to do with the quality of the new product the organiza​tion wishes to pursue as with its financial structure.  Nevertheless, given the threat of bankruptcy and the attendant costs, a very high debt-equity ratio may make future financing difficult.  It has been argued, for example, that railroads in the 1970s found it hard to find funds for new investments in piggybacking, a large technical improvement in railroading, because the threat of bankruptcy from prior poor investments was so high.

RATES OF RETURN

            There are two measures of profitability common in the financial com​munity, return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE).

                        ROA = net income / total average assets

                        ROE = net income / total stockholders equity

            Assets and equity, as used in these two common indexes, are both mea​sured in terms of book value.  Thus, if assets were acquired some time ago at a low price, the current performance of the organization may be over​stated by the use of historically valued denominators.  As a result, the ac​counting returns for any investment generally do not correlate well with the true economic internal rate of return for that investment.

            Difficulties with using either ROA and ROE as a performance measure can be seen in merger transactions.  Suppose we have an organization that has been earning a net income of $500 on assets with a book value of $1000, for a hefty ROA of 50 percent.  That organization is now acquired by a sec​ond firm, which then moves the new assets onto its books at the acquisition price, assuming the acquisition is treated using the purchase method of ac​counting.  Of course, the acquisition price will be considerably above the $1,000 book value of assets, for the potential acquirer will have to pay hand​somely for the privilege of earning $500 on a regular basis.  Suppose the ac​quirer pays $2,000 for the assets.  After the acquisition, it will appear that the returns of the acquired firm have fallen.  The firm continues to earn $500, but the asset base is now $2,000, so the ROA is reduced to 25 percent.  Indeed, the ROA may be less as a result of other factors, such as increased de​preciation of the newly acquired assets.  Yet in fact nothing has happened to the earnings of the firm.  All that has changed is its accounting, not its perfor​mance.

            Another fundamental problem with ROA and ROE measures comes from the tendency of analysts to focus on performance in single years, years that may be idiosyncratic.  At a minimum, one should examine these ratios averaging over a number of years to isolate idiosyncratic returns and try to find patterns in the data.

STOCK MARKET RATIOS

Several ratios are calculated not from the income statements and balance sheets of organizations, but from data associated with their stock market performance.  The three most common ratios are earnings per share (EPS), the price-earnings ratio (P/E), and the dividend-yield ratio:

                             EPS = (net income - preferred dividends) /

                                         common shares outstanding

                               P/E = market price per share / earnings per share

            Dividend yield = annual dividends / price per share

            EPS is one of the most widely used statistics.  Indeed, it is required to be given in the income statements of publicly traded firms.  As we can see, the ratio tells us how much the firm has earned per share of stock outstanding.  As it turns out, this is not generally a very helpful statistic.  It says nothing about how many assets a firm used to generate those earnings, and hence nothing about profitability.  Nor does it tell us how much the individual stockholder has paid per share for the rights over that annual earning.  Fur​ther, accounting practices in the calculation of earnings may distort these ra​tios.  And finally, the treatment of inventories is again problematic.

            The P/E is another ratio commonly cited.  Indeed, P/Es are reported in daily newspapers.  A high P/E tends to indicate that investors believe the future prospects of the firm are better than its current performance.  They are in some sense paying more per share than the firm's current earnings warrant.  Again, earnings are treated differently in different accounting prac​tices.

            Finally, from the perspective of some stockholders at least, dividend pol​icy may be important.  The dividend-yield ratio tells us how much of its earn​ings the firm pays out in dividends versus reinvestment.  Rapidly growing firms in new areas tend to have low dividend-yield ratios; more mature firms tend to have higher ratios.

SUMMARY

In this note, we have briefly reviewed a variety of ratios commonly used in strategic planning.  All of these ratios are subject to manipulation through opportunistic accounting practices.  Nevertheless, taken as a group and used judiciously, they may help to identify firms or business units in particular trouble.  Finding profitable new ventures requires rather more work.

Adapted from

http://www.nd.edu/~mgrecon/simulations/micromaticweb/financialratios.html