Company Analysis Introduction To conduct the company analysis, you need to select one listed company and estimate its intrinsic value of shareholders’ equity. You also have to critically analyze the company and provide recommendations on the company’s future business strategy. Your report should demonstrate your mastering of the key knowledge and skills learnt from your undergraduate study in such areas as accounting, finance, economics, and management. Selection of company You should investigate one company which is currently listed on the Main Broad of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong with a listing history of at least five years. Coverage of the report You report should cover the following major aspects: 1. Evaluate the accounting and financial performance of the company. 2. Assess the intrinsic value of equity through the process of business valuation with sensitivity analysis. 3. Consider the risk factor of the company. 4. Conduct a critical analysis (e.g., SWOT analysis) of the company. 5. Provide recommendations on the company’s future business strategy. Guidelines of the report The following suggests the guidelines that you can follow in preparing your research report. The list is not exhaustive and you are welcome to include additional analyses that will enrich the findings of your report. Evaluation of accounting and financial performance Your evaluation of the accounting and financial performance of the company can consist of the following steps: (a) Evaluate accounting quality. For example, you can examine whether the firm has any accounting/auditing issues. (b) Prepare comparative financial statements. Discuss any interesting patterns in the numbers. For example, has sales been growing or declining? 1 (c) Compute financial ratios of the firm and its peers. Consider using various approaches to conduct ratio analyses: (i) Time-series analyses: the same firm over time (e.g., Hang Seng Bank from 2014 to 2016) (ii) Cross-sectional analyses: different firms at a single point in time (e.g., Hang Seng Bank versus BOC Hong Kong versus Bank of East Asia) (iii) Benchmark comparisons: using industry norms or pre-determined standards Some possible financial ratios that can be used in your analyses: (i) Profit margin (ii) Interest coverage (iii) Debt service cover (iv) Short-term liquidity (v) Leverage (vi) Operating efficiency (vii) Return on capital (e.g., ROA and ROE) You might also want to do a DuPont decomposition of ROE to examine the drivers of ROE. (d) Relying on your analyses of historical numbers, make some inferences about the future. Discuss about your expectations of the future earnings and/or future cash flows, as well as the risks, faced by the company. Business valuation There are two approaches to valuation which are discounted cash flow approach and relative valuation approach. (a) Discounted cash flow (DCF) approach DCF approach is the basic on which all other valuation approaches are built and is commonly used to estimate the attractiveness of an investment opportunity. This approach adopts free cash flow estimations and then discounts them to arrive at a present value, which will be taken into account to evaluate the potential for a specific investment. Therefore, by using this valuation approach, three parameters must be considered seriously, which are “asset life”, “cash flow per annum” and “discount rate”. The annual cash flows vary for different kinds of business and company, and the discount rate actually reflects the riskiness of the projected cash flows. (b) Relative valuation approach The value of an asset is estimated by the existing price of comparable assets, which is represented in term of a common variable such as price to cash flow, enterprise value, operating margin, sales, etc. The assumptions of this approach are that other firms in the same industry are comparable to the subject firm and the prices of those comparable firms are fair and correct under the prevailing market condition. 2 Price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is one of the common multiples used in this approach, which is calculated by dividing the share price of the comparable company by its earnings per share (EPS). A company with a high P/E ratio is trading at a higher price per dollar of earnings than its peers and is considered overvalued. Another multiple in wide use is the price-to-book value (P/B) ratio, with firms selling at a discount on book value relative to comparable firms being considered undervalued. Revenue multiple are also used to value firms, with the average price-sales (P/S) ratios of firms with similar characteristics being used for comparison. Analysis of economic environment You can examine both the microeconomic and macroeconomic environment surrounding the company and assess their implications to the business performance. (a) Microeconomic environment (i) Factors affecting the demand for the company’s products/services (ii) Factors affecting the production cost (iii) Prospect of the industry (iv) Level of competition in the industry and the application of Porter’s five forces model (v) Effects of government’s regulatory policy (b) Macroeconomic environment (i) Whether and how the company’s performance is affected by such domestic macroeconomic factors as GDP, interest rate, inflation, etc. (ii) Whether and how the company’s performance is affected by such global macroeconomic factors as exchange rate, foreign countries’ economic performance, etc. You can consider to apply quantitative tools into your economic analysis. For example, if you are analyzing the company Link REIT (stock code: 823) whose major source of income is retail rental, you can run a time-series regression of the company’s retail rental on such economic factors as GDP growth, level of household income, retail sales value, unemployment rate, inflation rate, and tourist arrival, etc. to obtain the estimates of how the changes of these economic factors affect the retail rental income. Risk factors You have to discuss all the possible risk factors faced by the company. The following lists some of the possible risk factors: (a) Operational risk: e.g., rising material cost, over-capacity, etc. (b) Economic risk: e.g., declines in economic conditions, etc. (c) Financial risk: e.g., exchange rate risk, interest rate risk, etc. 3 (d) Political and regulatory risk: e.g., change in government’s overall economic policy and/or regulatory policy on the industry SWOT analysis Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the company, and identify the opportunities open to the company and the threats which it faces. Recommendations to company management Based on the above analysis, you should provide recommendations and suggestions to the company management with respect but not limited to the following dimensions wherever applicable: (a) Accounting policy: e.g., inventory policy, etc. (b) Financial policy: e.g., leverage, payout policy, etc. (c) Production and marketing policy: e.g., consolidation of production plant, expansion or contraction of product line, market diversification, etc. (d) Corporate governance (e) Corporate social responsibility 4 Sample of Company Analysis The following is a sample of the Company Analysis on Chu Kong Shipping Enterprise (Group) Company Limited. Please note that this sample shows only a reduced version of the evaluation of accounting and financial performance, approaches used in business valuation, and discussion of the risk factors and competitive advantage. The more in-depth analysis of the company and recommendations on the company’s future business strategy are not included. Company Background Chu Kong Shipping Enterprises (Group) Company Limited ("CKSG") is listed in Hong Kong on May 23rd, 1997 (0560.HK) and majorly held by Chu Kong Shipping Enterprises (Holdings) Company Limited (62% of shareholding), which is wholly owned by Guangdong Province Navigation Group Company Limited, a state-owned logistics enterprise in Guangdong Province. CKSG’s principal business is investment holdings and engages in below four fields of business: (A) Terminal navigation logistics business It mainly comprises of cargo transportation, cargo handling and storage businesses by providing an one stop service of (i) cargo forwarding services for containerized or break-bulk cargoes from the PRC for direct shipment to Hong Kong or transshipment to other countries via Hong Kong; (ii) cargo handling services (including mid-stream operations), cargo consolidation and warehousing from its private wharf located in Tuen Mun, the Marine Cargo Terminal at the Hong Kong International Airport, and the Hong Kong Public Cargo Working Areas to serve river vessels from the PRC; (iii) container hauling and trucking in Hong Kong which provide services from its private wharf in Tuen Mun to the Kwai Chung Container Terminal or vice versa. It also engages in air cargo transportation by obtaining the operating license for the only Marine Cargo Terminal at the Hong Kong International Airport, to provide river shipping for air cargoes between Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. For example, it transships air cargo to the Marine Cargo Terminal when it arrives at the Hong Kong International Airport, then forwards cargo to the Shenzhen Huangtian airport by river vessels, for shipment by air cargo to other cities in the PRC including Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, Chengdu, Chongqing, Nanjing, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Shenyang, Hefei, and Kunming. (B) Passenger transportation business It provides high-speed ferry service business and related services, management and administration