UMACLK-15-M Financial Statement Analysis

You are a respected city analyst who specialises in advising clients who are interested in purchasing equities in a given industry sector. You are asked to give investment advice on a company to be agreed at an early opportunity with the module leader.

Your company must be:

• Discussed and agreed with the module leader by Wednesday 4th  February 2015

• Quoted on a major stock exchange (e.g. LSE, NYSE)

• A prominent company, for which significant information is publicly available in English (both financial and non-financial information)

• Drawn from a mainstream industry where there are readily identifiable peers (competitors) for which you can also gather good financial information

• Drawn from an industry where you can gather good industry-wide information and from a country where there is readily available macroeconomic indicator information

Requirement for the Equity Analyst’s Report

You are to produce a company (equity) analysis report. It is expected that you will use the full range of information sources available to you (including DataStream, Osiris, and Bloomberg Professional, where possible) to complete your assignment.

Once you have completed your student tearsheet presentation exercise and received some informal, formative feedback from your module leader and informal feedback from your module colleagues, you must engage in deeper analysis to produce a full equity analyst’s report. The report must be word-processed and the length must not exceed 3,000 words. Your report must contain the following sections:

a) Analyst’s tearsheet;

b) Company profile, including a segmental analysis;

c) Macroeconomic analysis;

d) Industry analysis;

e) Competitor analysis, using Porter’s Five Forces model;

f) Discussion of the company’s business model and corporate strategy;

g) Analysis of key corporate events and activities (if relevant) that might have impact of the future performance and value of the company;

h) A summary analysis of the company’s financial statements;

i) A full financial ratio analysis, including trend analysis, comparison with industry ratios, the identification and computation of customised industry ratios;

j) Company valuations, employing dividend models (where appropriate), multiples models, and FCF models with all assumptions justified;

k) A basic financial statement modelling analysis, with an Excel printout of that model to be placed in the appendix, along with a justification of the assumptions made;

l) A conclusion which summarises the key points made across your report, the outlook for the company, and the investment recommendation, the latter of which compares your valuations with the current market price;

m) A references section at the end of your report.

Your report is to be pitched at fund managers who require investment advice on buying/selling shares in the company you have selected. You must clearly reference any material you have used at the end of your report and carefully source all data tables, graphs, and material from other parties, giving the date at which the data was collected. Be very careful to avoid plagiarism – please work through the Library Skill Zone web pages on referencing and plagiarism before commencing your coursework.

The assessment criteria for the report are given below to help you to prepare.

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