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What the company puts out

The place to start is the website of the company you are interested in. There are two aspects to this.

1. How do they present themselves on the internet and what can you glean about the underlying business strengths in terms of customer appeal, etc.;
2. The financials: i.e. how have they been performing with regard to making profits for shareholders? And how strong is the financial structure, e.g. do they have too much debt and are therefore too risky?

Figure 7.1 shows Rolls-Royce’s opening page. You can immediately gather important information. If you click on the buttons for its different divisions, such as ‘Civil Aerospace’, you can get more detailed information on the engines it supplies. Thus a potential customer can ...