Skip to Main Content
Corporate Finance, 5th Edition
book

Corporate Finance, 5th Edition

by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann Le Fur, Antonio Salvi
December 2017
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1024 pages
32h 22m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Corporate Finance, 5th Edition

Chapter 9 Margin analysis: structure

If financial analysis were a puppet, company strategy would be pulling its strings

An analysis of a company’s margins is the first step in any financial analysis. It is a key stage because a company that does not manage to sell its products or services for more than the corresponding production costs is clearly doomed to fail. But, as we shall see, positive margins are not sufficient on their own to create value or to escape bankruptcy.

Net income is what is left after all the revenues and charges shown on the income statement have been taken into account. Readers will not therefore be very surprised to learn that we will not spend too much time on analysing net income as such. A company’s performance depends primarily on its operating performance, which explains why recurring operating profit (or EBIT) is the focus of analysts’ attention. Financial and non-recurrent items are regarded as being almost “inevitable” or “automatic” and are thus less interesting, particularly when it comes to forecasting a company’s future prospects.

The first step in margin analysis is to examine the accounting practices used by the company to draw up its income statement. We dealt with this subject in Chapter 8 and shall not restate it here, except to stress how important it is. Given the emphasis placed by analysts on studying operating profit, there is a big temptation for companies to present an attractive recurring operating profit by transferring operating ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Corporate Finance For Dummies

Corporate Finance For Dummies

Michael Taillard
Fundamentals of Corporate Finance, 4th Edition

Fundamentals of Corporate Finance, 4th Edition

Robert Parrino, David S. Kidwell, Thomas Bates, Stuart L. Gillan
Corporate Finance Theory and Practice, Third Edition

Corporate Finance Theory and Practice, Third Edition

Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann Le Fur, Antonio Salvi
Corporate Finance: A Practical Approach, Second Edition

Corporate Finance: A Practical Approach, Second Edition

CFA Michelle R. Clayman, CFA Martin S. Fridson, CFA George H. Troughton

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119424482Purchase book