Success in the business world requires participants to have a good understanding

Success in the business world requires participants to have a good understanding of how companies perform. This is made possible by examining the various ratios based on the financial statements. Whereas the ability to calculate ratios is important, the real value of ratios lies in the insight that can be gleaned from them. Therefore, the most important aspect – as well as the goal – of this assessment is the interpretation of ratios.
You are required to produce a slide deck to analyse a company of your choice.
The main questions to answer:
How well is the chosen company performing?
Using a minimum of 5 ratios [you can do as many as you deem fit to tell a good story] generated based on financial statements of a firm to examine the recent past performance (up to 5 years).
Drawing on news and reports, estimate how these ratios could potentially change in the near future (up to 3 years) to give an indication of how the company could perform
Provide a view as to how the industry is performing and how your chosen company compares vis-a-vis the industry
Dedicate a page to corporate social responsibility (see below)
These are the minimum questions that the submission will have to address.
Since this is a graduate-level course, it is expected that your final output would be produced to a professional standard. Bear in mind the following when it comes to quality assurance:
Logic of the analysis
Error-free writing/quality control
Keeping it precise and concise – get to the point
Consistent formatting
Referencing
Your submission must be telling a story instead of just presenting a collection of facts and figures. You are welcome to deploy any technique to make it an easy, interesting and informative read. Feel free to use appendix. There is no need to show any equation or definition related to the ratios chosen – the assignment is about making business sense out of them.
Please also have one page dedicated to examining the corporate sustainability policies/actions of the company and comment on what social impact, both positive and negative, that the company′ activities are causing. Examine the role of sustainability plays in the company’s strategy and how it can be potentially affecting its financial performance in the future.
One of the challenges of this assignment is that usually in financial statements there will be a lot of details that can be very accounting-wise technical. One way to get around this is to aggregate the details into major categories (e.g. if there are different types of interest expenses, just add them all up to form one single “interest expense”). The idea is to take a step back and focus on the big picture instead of getting bogged down by unnecessary details.
You are very welcome to choose a private company or a company that you own or you work for. If it is confidential information, please clearly state ″Confidential″ on every page of the slidedeck. However, the recommendation is always choosing a public company as there is simply much more data available. Why waste time on looking for data when you can spend it on the analysis?
Last but not least, please note that this is a “beauty contest”, which means not everyone will get a high grade – some will be better than most. In other words, you are competing with your colleagues. This is how the world of business works when it comes to selecting the winner among different bidders. This also means that it is inevitable that the grades given to your submission will be subjective.