PART I: Business Environment and Company Financial Information

1. COMPANY RESEARCH AND INFORMATION

Research your company on its corporate website and/or other sources. Gather the following data:

a. Obtain a set of downloaded current financial statements and public disclosures. You must include three years of historical data. For the balance sheet, you will need four years to derive average balances for three years. This may require you to pull more than one year’s 10K filing. Use the most current SEC filings data.

i. Income Statement

ii. Balance Sheet

iii. Statements of Cash Flows

iv. Statement of Shareholder’s Equity

b. Obtain a copy of the financial footnotes to these statements, the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A), and the Auditor’s Opinion included in the SEC filing.

c. Gather industry financial standards for the company’s financial information and ratios.

d. Gather any pertinent financial press releases of the company, including the year-end release that coincides with your annual SEC filing and any releases subsequent to that period.

e. Review any company analyst calls or shareholder meeting videos from the company website, if applicable.

2. COMPANY EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Prepare a summary of the company.

What do they do?

What industry do they operate in?

Where are the located?

Basic statistical facts about their size, history, culture and leaders.

Identify their customers and suppliers

How are they financed? What is their NBV? 

What is their market cap? How does NBV and market cap compare? Is their working capital strong?

What is there credit rating?

What is their fiscal year-end?

What are the major accounting guidelines impacting the company and its industry?

What is its current stock price?

Who are the auditors? What is the most current audit opnion?

Include any other information about your company that is pertinent to its industry or operations.

Include a summary of the initial financial assessment of the company’s profitability (Are they profitable? What are their profit trends? What are their margins? Comparison to competitors) and its cash flows.

3. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Prepare an assessment of the business environment of the company:

a. Prepare the Porter Five Forces analysis

b. Prepare a SWOT analysis

c. Competitive analysis that includes market share data for the industry players

4. FINANCIAL STATEMENT TEMPLATE

a. Prepare a financial statement template in EXCEL for the Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows using the data obtained from your SEC filings.  Must include current and two historical years of annual data (three years of data) for the income statement and four years of balance sheet data.  

b. Prepare a common-size income statement, using total revenues as the basis, for your company. Prepare a common-size balance sheet, using total assets as the basis, for your company. Review similar information for your competitor. Briefly summarize any conclusions from the trends.