Financial Report of company’s performance

This assignment seeks to assess your ability to:
• Evaluate the performance of a company through a critical analysis of its published financial statements over the two latest years, as follows:
o Locate, extract and analyse data from the published financial statements1 to provide a comprehensive analysis of a company’s operations and performance;
o Structure an argument about performance based on the analysis of five aspects of performance evaluation:
? Profitability
? Efficiency
? Short-term solvency
? Long term solvency
? Market based ratios
• Present a clear, well-structured report using appropriate style and language.
CASE SCENARIO
You are a managerial accountant who has been asked to analyse the latest Annual Report and Financial Statements (it must contain two years information) of a publicly listed company that is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (www.asx.com.au). You must choose the publicly listed company and produce a comprehensive report for distribution to the company’s management to comply with all the requirements listed below. [I suggest/prefer something healthcare related, or technology or fitness industry]
Note that the calculation of ratios does not earn many marks. While they are expected to be accurate, most marks will be earned by demonstrating your understanding of ratio analysis and its uses. This will be apparent to the reader from your analysis of the implications of theratios you present and your ability to provide some explanation through the recognition of the interaction between ratios. You are also expected to make some recommendations to management based on your analysis.
REQUIRED
Prepare a word-processed report containing the following:
1. An analysis of the information contained in the latest Annual Report and Financial Statements of the company, commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of the company over two years by applying ratio analysis in the categories listed above;
2. Suggestions or recommendations for improving the business, based on the analysis;
3. Full referencing of your sources of information, which may include any external sources such as the financial press, commentators and the internet that you may have used to strengthen your analysis.
You should put the ratio calculations in an appropriate appendix so that the body of the text only states the result of the calculation (e.g. ‘…argument is supported by a debtors collection period of 26 days’) and not the process of calculating it. Pay attention to the presentation of this appendix so that it is user friendly and it is easy to locate any ratio. Do not calculate every ratio in the list in your textbook—you should be selective and only go beyond the major ratios, which are discussed in the textbook, if you have decided that further detailed analysis of an aspect of the statements will better enable the development or justification of a recommendation to management. The quality of the analysis is more important than the quantity of ratios.
Please submit a copy of the annual report with your assignment.