Managing Float

Several kinds of delay create float, so people in the cash management business refer to several kinds of float. Figure 2.5 shows the three sources of float:
The time that it takes to mail a check.
The time that it takes the company to process the check after it has been received.
The time that it takes the bank to clear the check and adjust the firm’s account.

The total collection time is the sum of these three sources of delay.
Delays that help the payer hurt the recipient. Recipients try to speed up collections. Payers try to slow down disbursements. Both attempt to minimize
net float.
You probably have come across attempts by companies to reduce float in your own financial transactions. For example, some stores now encourage you to pay bills with your bank debit card instead of a credit card. The payment is automatically debited from your bank account on the day of the transaction, which eliminates the considerable float you otherwise would enjoy until you were billed by your credit card company and paid your bill. Similarly, many companies now arrange preauthorized payments with their customers. For example, if you have a mortgage payment on a house, the lender can arrange to have your bank account debited by the amount of the payment each month.
The funds are automatically transferred to the lender. You save the work of paying the bill by hand, and the lender saves the few days of float during which your check would have been processed through the banking system. The nearby box discusses tactics that banks use to maximize their income from float.

SPEEDING UP COLLECTIONS

One way to speed up collections is by a method known as concentration banking. In this case customers in a particular area make payments to a local branch office rather than to company headquarters. The local branch office then deposits the checks into a local bank account. Surplus funds are periodically transferred to a concentration account at one of the company’s principal banks.
Concentration banking reduces float in two ways. First, because the branch office is nearer to the customer, mailing time is reduced. Second, because the customers are local, the chances are that they have local bank accounts and therefore the time taken to clear their checks is also reduced. Another advantage is that concentration brings many small balances together in one large, central balance, which then can be invested in interest-paying assets through a single transaction. For example, when Amoco streamlined its U.S. bank accounts, it was able to reduce its daily bank balances in non–interest-bearing accounts by almost 80 percent.
Unfortunately, concentration banking also involves additional costs. First, the company is likely to incur additional administrative costs. Second, the company’s local bank needs to be paid for its services. Third, there is the cost of transferring the funds to the concentration bank. The fastest but most expensive arrangement is wire transfer, in which funds are transferred from one account to another via computer entries in the accounts. A slower but cheaper method is a depository transfer check, or DTC. This is a preprinted check used to transfer funds between specified accounts. The funds become available within 2 days.
Wire transfer makes more sense when large funds are being transferred. For example, at a daily interest rate of .02 percent, the daily interest on a $10 million payment would be $2,000. Suppose a wire transfer costs $10. It clearly would pay to spend $10 to save 2 days’ float. On the other hand, it would not be worth using wire transfer for just $5,000. The extra 2 days’ interest that you pick up amounts to only $2, not nearly enough to justify the extra expense of the wire transfer.

Cash Collection, Disbursement, and Float

Companies don’t keep their cash in a little tin box; they keep it in a bank deposit. To understand how they can make best use of that deposit, you need to understand what happens when companies withdraw money from their account or pay money into it.
 
FLOAT

Suppose that the United Carbon Company has $1 million in a demand deposit (checking account) with its bank. It now pays one of its suppliers by writing and mailing a check for $200,000. The company’s records are immediately adjusted to show a cash balance of $800,000. Thus the company is said to have a ledger balance of $800,000.
But the company’s bank won’t learn anything about this check until it has been received by the supplier, deposited at the supplier’s bank, and finally presented to United Carbon’s bank for payment. During this time United Carbon’s bank continues to show in its ledger that the company has a balance of $1 million.
While the check is clearing, the company obtains the benefit of an extra $200,000 in the bank. This sum is often called disbursement float, or payment float.

Float sounds like a marvelous invention; every time you spend money, it takes the bank a few days to catch on. Unfortunately it can also work in reverse. Suppose that in addition to paying its supplier, United Carbon receives a check for $120,000 from a customer. It first processes the check and then deposits it in the bank. At this point both the company and the bank increase the ledger balance by $120,000:

But this money isn’t available to the company immediately. The bank doesn’t actually have the money in hand until it has sent the check to the customer’s bank and received payment. Since the bank has to wait, it makes United Carbon wait too—usually 1 or 2 business days. In the meantime, the bank will show that United Carbon still has an available balance of only $1 million. The extra $120,000 has been deposited but is not yet available. It is therefore known as availability float.
Notice that the company gains as a result of the payment float and loses as a result of availability float. The net float available to the firm is the difference between payment and availability float:
Net float = payment float – availability float

In our example, the net float is $80,000. The company’s available balance is $80,000 greater than the balance shown in its ledger.

VALUING FLOAT

Float results from the delay between your writing a check and the reduction in your bank balance. The amount of float will therefore depend on the size of the check and the delay in collection.
As financial manager your concern is with the available balance, not with the company’s ledger balance. If you know that it is going to be a week before some of your checks are presented for payment, you may be able to get by on a smaller cash balance.
The smaller you can keep your cash balance, the more funds you can hold in interest earning accounts or securities. This game is often called playing the float.
You can increase your available cash balance by increasing your net float. This
means that you want to ensure that checks received from customers are cleared rapidly and those paid to suppliers are cleared slowly. Perhaps this may sound like rather small change, but think what it can mean to a company like Ford. Ford’s daily sales average over $400 million. If it could speed up collections by 1 day, and the interest rate is .02 percent per day (about 7.3 percent per year), it would increase earnings by .0002 × $400 million = $80,000 per day.
What would be the present value to Ford if it could permanently reduce its collection period by 1 day? That extra interest income would then be a perpetuity, and the present value of the income would be $50,000/.0002 = $250 million, exactly equal to the reduction in float.
Why should this be? Think about the company’s cash-flow stream. It receives $250 million a day. At any time, suppose that 4 days’ worth of payments are deposited and “in the pipeline.” When it speeds up the collection period by a day, the pipeline will shrink to 3 days’ worth of payments. At that point, Ford receives an extra $250 million cash flow: it receives the “usual” payment of $250 million, and it also receives the $250 million for which it ordinarily would have had to wait an extra day. From that day forward, it continues to receive $250 million a day, exactly as before. So the net effect of reducing the payment pipeline from 4 days to 3 is that Ford gets an extra up-front payment equal to 1 day of float, or $250 million. We conclude that the present value of a permanent reduction in float is simply the amount by which float is reduced.
However, you should be careful not to become overenthusiastic at managing the
float. Writing checks on your account for the sole purpose of creating float and earning interest is called check kiting and is illegal. In 1985 the brokerage firm E. F. Hutton pleaded guilty to 2,000 separate counts of mail and wire fraud. Hutton admitted that it had created nearly $1 billion of float by shuffling funds between its branches and through various accounts at different banks.

A Short-Term Financing Plan

 OPTIONS FOR SHORT-TERM FINANCING

Suppose that Dynamic can borrow up to $40 million from the bank at an interest cost of 8 percent per year or 2 percent per quarter. Dynamic can also raise capital by putting off paying its bills and thus increasing its accounts payable. In effect, this is taking a loan from its suppliers. The financial manager believes that Dynamic can defer the following amounts in each quarter:

That is, $52 million can be saved in the first quarter by not paying bills in that quarter. (Note that Table 2.7 was prepared assuming these bills are paid in the first quarter.) If deferred, these payments must be made in the second quarter. Similarly, $48 million of the second quarter’s bills can be deferred to the third quarter and so on.
Stretching payables is often costly, however, even if no ill will is incurred.7 This is because many suppliers offer discounts for prompt payment, so that Dynamic loses the discount if it pays late. In this example we assume the lost discount is 5 percent of the amount deferred. In other words, if a $52 million payment is delayed in the first quarter, the firm must pay 5 percent more, or $54.6 million in the next quarter. This is like borrowing at an annual interest rate of over 20 percent (1.054 – 1 = .216, or 21.6%).
With these two options, the short-term financing strategy is obvious: use the lower cost bank loan first. Stretch payables only if you can’t borrow enough from the bank.
Table 2.9 shows the resulting plan. The first panel (cash requirements) sets out the cash that needs to be raised in each quarter. The second panel (cash raised) describes the various sources of financing the firm plans to use. The third and fourth panels describe how the firm will use net cash inflows when they turn positive.
In the first quarter the plan calls for borrowing the full amount available from the bank ($40 million). In addition, the firm sells the $5 million of marketable securities it held at the end of 2000. Thus under this plan it raises the necessary $45 million in the first quarter.
In the second quarter, an additional $15 million must be raised to cover the net cash outflow predicted in Table 2.7. In addition, $.8 million must be raised to pay interest on the bank loan. Therefore, the plan calls for Dynamic to maintain its bank borrowing and to stretch $15.8 million in payables. Notice that in the first two quarters, when net cash flow from operations is negative, the firm maintains its cash balance at the minimum acceptable level. Additions to cash balances are zero. Similarly, repayments of outstanding debt are zero. In fact outstanding debt rises in each of these quarters.
In the third and fourth quarters, the firm generates a cash-flow surplus, so the plan calls for Dynamic to pay off its debt. First it pays off stretched payables, as it is required to do, and then it uses any remaining cash-flow surplus to pay down its bank loan. In the third quarter, all of the net cash inflow is used to reduce outstanding short-term borrowing. In the fourth quarter, the firm pays off its remaining short-term borrowing and uses the extra $3 million to increase its cash balances.

Sources of Short-Term Financing

We suggested that Dynamic’s manager might want to investigate alternative sources of short-term borrowing. Here are some of the possibilities.

BANK LOANS

The simplest and most common source of short-term finance is an unsecured loan from a bank. For example, Dynamic might have a standing arrangement with its bank allowing it to borrow up to $40 million. The firm can borrow and repay whenever it wants so long as it does not exceed the credit limit. This kind of arrangement is called a line of credit.
Lines of credit are typically reviewed annually, and it is possible that the bank may seek to cancel it if the firm’s creditworthiness deteriorates. If the firm wants to be sure that it will be able to borrow, it can enter into a revolving credit agreement with the bank. Revolving credit arrangements usually last for a few years and formally commit the bank to lending up to the agreed limit. In return the bank will require the firm to pay a commitment fee of around .25 percent on any unused amount.
Most bank loans have durations of only a few months. For example, Dynamic
may need a loan to cover a seasonal increase in inventories, and the loan is then repaid as the goods are sold. However, banks also make term loans, which last for several years. These term loans sometimes involve huge sums of money, and in this case they may be parceled out among a syndicate of banks. For example, when Eurotunnel needed to arrange more than $10 billion of borrowing to construct the tunnel between Britain and France, a syndicate of more than 200 international banks combined to provide the cash.

COMMERCIAL PAPER

When banks lend money, they provide two services. They match up would-be borrowers and lenders and they check that the borrower is likely to repay the loan. Banks recover the costs of providing these services by charging borrowers on average a higher interest rate than they pay to lenders. These services are less necessary for large, well-known companies that regularly need to raise large amounts of cash. These companies have increasingly found it profitable to bypass the bank and to sell short-term debt, known as commercial paper, directly to large investors. Banks have been forced to respond by reducing the interest rates on their loans to blue-chip customers.
In the United States commercial paper has a maximum maturity of 9 months, though most paper matures in 60 days or less. Commercial paper is not secured, but companies generally back their issue of paper by arranging a special backup line of credit with a bank. This guarantees that they can find the money to repay the paper, and the risk of default is therefore small.
Some companies regularly sell commercial paper in huge amounts. For example, GE Capital Corporation has about $70 billion of commercial paper in issue.

SECURED LOANS

Many short-term loans are unsecured, but sometimes the company may offer assets as security. Since the bank is lending on a short-term basis, the security generally consists of liquid assets such as receivables, inventories, or securities. For example, a firm may decide to borrow short-term money secured by its accounts receivable. When its customers pay their bills, it can use the cash collected to repay the loan. Banks will not usually lend the full value of the assets that are used as security. For example, a firm that puts up $100,000 of receivables as security may find that the bank is prepared to lend only $75,000. The safety margin (or haircut, as it is called) is likely to be even larger in
the case of loans that are secured by inventory.
Accounts Receivable Financing. When a loan is secured by receivables, the firm assigns the receivables to the bank. If the firm fails to repay the loan, the bank can collect the receivables from the firm’s customers and use the cash to pay off the debt. However, the firm is still responsible for the loan even if the receivables ultimately cannot be collected. The risk of default on the receivables is therefore borne by the firm.
An alternative procedure is to sell the receivables at a discount to a financial institution known as a factor and let it collect the money. In other words, some companies solve their financing problem by borrowing on the strength of their current assets; others solve it by selling their current assets. Once the firm has sold its receivables, the factor bears all the responsibility for collecting on the accounts. Therefore, the factor plays three roles: it administers collection of receivables, takes responsibility for bad debts, and provides finance.
Inventory Financing. Banks also lend on the security of inventory, but they are
choosy about the inventory they will accept. They want to make sure that they can identify and sell it if you default. Automobiles and other standardized nonperishable commodities are good security for a loan; work in progress and ripe strawberries are poor collateral.
Banks need to monitor companies to be sure they don’t sell their assets and run off with the money. Consider, for example, the story of the great salad oil swindle. Fifty-one banks and companies made loans for nearly $200 million to the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corporation in the belief that these loans were secured on valuable salad oil. Unfortunately, they did not notice that Allied’s tanks contained false compartments which were mainly filled with seawater. When the fraud was discovered, the president of Allied went to jail and the 51 lenders stayed out in the cold looking for their $200 million. The nearby box presents a similar story that illustrates the potential pitfalls of secured lending. Here, too, the loans were not as “secured” as they appeared:
the supposed collateral did not exist.
To protect themselves against this sort of risk, lenders often insist on field ware-
housing. An independent warehouse company hired by the bank supervises the inventory pledged as collateral for the loan. As the firm sells its product and uses the revenue to pay back the loan, the bank directs the warehouse company to release the inventory back to the firm. If the firm defaults on the loan, the bank keeps the inventory and sells it to recover the debt.

Links between Long-Term and Short-Term Financing

Businesses require capital—that is, money invested in plant, machinery, inventories, accounts receivable, and all the other assets it takes to run a company efficiently.
Typically, these assets are not purchased all at once but are obtained gradually over time as the firm grows. The total cost of these assets is called the firm’s total capital requirement.
When we discussed long-term planning, we showed how the firm needs to develop a sensible strategy that allows it to finance its long-term goals and weather possible setbacks. But the firm’s total capital requirement does not grow smoothly and the company must be able to meet temporary demands for cash. This is the focus of short-term financial planning.
Figure 2.3 illustrates the growth in the firm’s total capital requirements. The
upward-sloping line shows that as the business grows, it is likely to need additional fixed assets and current assets. You can think of this trendline as showing the base level of capital that is required. In addition to this base capital requirement, there may be seasonal fluctuations in the business that require an additional investment in current assets.
Thus the wavy line in the illustration shows that the total capital requirement peaks late in each year. In practice, there would also be week-to-week and month-to-month fluctuations in the capital requirement, but these are not shown in Figure 2.3.

The total capital requirement can be met through either long- or short-term financing. When long-term financing does not cover the total capital requirement, the firm must raise short-term capital to make up the difference. When long-term financing more than covers the total capital requirement, the firm has surplus cash available for short-term investment. Thus the amount of long-term financing raised, given the total capital requirement, determines whether the firm is a short-term borrower or lender.
The three panels in Figure 2.4 illustrate this. Each depicts a different long-term financing strategy. The “relaxed strategy” in panel a always implies a short-term cash surplus. This surplus will be invested in marketable securities. The “restrictive” policy illustrated in panel c implies a permanent need for short-term borrowing. Finally, panel b illustrates an intermediate strategy: the firm has spare cash which it can lend out during the part of the year when total capital requirements are relatively low, but it is a borrower during the rest of the year when capital requirements are relatively high.
What is the best level of long-term financing relative to the total capital require-
ment? It is hard to say. We can make several practical observations, however.
1. Matching maturities. Most financial managers attempt to “match maturities” of assets and liabilities. That is, they finance long-lived assets like plant and machinery with long-term borrowing and equity. Short-term assets like inventory and accounts receivable are financed with short-term bank loans or by issuing short-term debt like commercial paper.
2. Permanent working-capital requirements. Most firms have a permanent investment in net working capital (current assets less current liabilities). By this we mean that they plan to have at all times a positive amount of working capital. This is financed from long-term sources. This is an extension of the maturity-matching principle. Since the working capital is permanent, it is funded with long-term sources of financing.
3. The comforts of surplus cash. Many financial managers would feel more comfortable under the relaxed strategy illustrated in Figure 2.4a than the restrictive strategy in panel c. Consider, for example, General Motors. At the end of 1998 it was sitting on a cash mountain of over $10 billion, almost certainly far more than it needed to meet any seasonal fluctuations in its capital requirements. Such firms with a surplus of long-term financing never have to worry about borrowing to pay next month’s bills. But is the financial manager paid to be comfortable? Firms usually put surplus cash to work in Treasury bills or other marketable securities. This is at best a zero-NPV investment for a tax-paying firm.
4 Thus we think that firms with a permanent cash surplus ought to go on a diet, retiring long-term securities to reduce long-term financing to a level at or below the firm’s total capital requirement. That is, if the firm is described by panel a, it ought to move down to panel b, or perhaps even lower.

Working Capital

THE COMPONENTS OF WORKING CAPITAL

Short-term, or current, assets and liabilities are collectively known as working capital. Table 2.1 gives a breakdown of current assets and liabilities for all manufacturing corporations in the United States in 1999. Total current assets were $1,352 billion and total   current liabilities were $1,046 billion.
Current Assets. One important current asset is accounts receivable. Accounts receivable arise because companies do not usually expect customers to pay for their purchases immediately. These unpaid bills are a valuable asset that companies expect to be able to turn into cash in the near future. The bulk of accounts receivable consists of unpaid bills from sales to other companies and are known as trade credit. The remainder arises from the sale of goods to the final consumer. These are known as consumer credit.
Another important current asset is inventory. Inventories may consist of raw materials, work in process, or finished goods awaiting sale and shipment. Table 2.1 shows that firms in the United States have about the same amount invested in inventories as in accounts receivable.
The remaining current assets are cash and marketable securities. The cash consists partly of dollar bills, but most of the cash is in the form of bank deposits. These may be demand deposits (money in checking accounts that the firm can pay out immediately) and time deposits (money in savings accounts that can be paid out only with a delay).
The principal marketable security is commercial paper (short-term unsecured debt sold by other firms). Other securities include Treasury bills, which are short-term debts sold by the United States government, and state and local government securities.
In managing their cash companies face much the same problem you do. There are always advantages to holding large amounts of ready cash—they reduce the risk of running out of cash and having to borrow more on short notice. On the other hand, there is a cost to holding idle cash balances rather than putting the money to work earning interest. In later we will tell you how the financial manager collects and pays out cash and decides on an optimal cash balance.
Current Liabilities. We have seen that a company’s principal current asset consists of unpaid bills. One firm’s credit must be another’s debit. Therefore, it is not surprising that a company’s principal current liability consists of accounts payable—that is, outstanding payments due to other companies.
The other major current liability consists of short-term borrowing. We will have
more to say about this later in this material.

WORKING CAPITAL AND THE CASH CONVERSION CYCLE

The difference between current assets and current liabilities is known as net working capital, but financial managers often refer to the difference simply (but imprecisely) as working capital. Usually current assets exceed current liabilities—that is, firms have positive net working capital. For United States manufacturing companies, current assets are on average 30 percent higher than current liabilities.
To see why firms need net working capital, imagine a small company, Simple Souvenirs, that makes small novelty items for sale at gift shops. It buys raw materials such as leather, beads, and rhinestones for cash, processes them into finished goods like wallets or costume jewelry, and then sells these goods on credit. Figure 2.1 shows the whole cycle of operations.
If you prepare the firm’s balance sheet at the beginning of the process, you see cash (a current asset). If you delay a little, you find the cash replaced first by inventories of raw materials and then by inventories of finished goods (also current assets). When the goods are sold, the inventories give way to accounts receivable (another current asset) and finally, when the customers pay their bills, the firm takes out its profit and replenishes the cash balance.
The components of working capital constantly change with the cycle of operations, but the amount of working capital is fixed. This is one reason why net working capital is a useful summary measure of current assets or liabilities.
Figure 2.2 depicts four key dates in the production cycle that influence the firm’s investment in working capital. The firm starts the cycle by purchasing raw materials, but it does not pay for them immediately. This delay is the accounts payable period. The firm processes the raw material and then sells the finished goods. The delay between the initial investment in inventories and the sale date is the inventory period. Some time after the firm has sold the goods its customers pay their bills. The delay between the date of sale and the date at which the firm is paid is the accounts receivable period.
The top part of Figure 2.2 shows that the total delay between initial purchase of raw materials and ultimate payments from customers is the sum of the inventory and accounts receivable periods: first the raw materials must be purchased, processed, and sold, and then the bills must be collected. However, the net time that the company is out of cash is reduced by the time it takes to pay its own bills. The length of time between the firm’s payment for its raw materials and the collection of payment from the customer is known as the firm’s cash conversion cycle. To summarize,
Cash conversion cycle = (inventory period + receivables period) – accounts payable period
The longer the production process, the more cash the firm must keep tied up
in inventories. Similarly, the longer it takes customers to pay their bills, the
higher the value of accounts receivable. On the other hand, if a firm can delay
paying for its own materials, it may reduce the amount of cash it needs. In
other words, accounts payable reduce net working capital.

THE WORKING CAPITAL TRADE-OFF

Of course the cash conversion cycle is not cast in stone. To a large extent it is within management’s control. Working capital can be managed. For example, accounts receivable are affected by the terms of credit the firm offers to its customers. You can cut the amount of money tied up in receivables by getting tough with customers who are slow in paying their bills. (You may find, however, that in the future they take their business elsewhere.) Similarly, the firm can reduce its investment in inventories of raw materials. (Here the risk is that it may one day run out of inventories and production will grind to a halt.)
These considerations show that investment in working capital has both costs and
benefits. For example, the cost of the firm’s investment in receivables is the interest that could have been earned if customers had paid their bills earlier. The firm also forgoes interest income when it holds idle cash balances rather than putting the money to work in marketable securities. The cost of holding inventory includes not only the opportunity cost of capital but also storage and insurance costs and the risk of spoilage or obsolescence. All of these carrying costs encourage firms to hold current assets to a minimum.
While carrying costs discourage large investments in current assets, too low a level of current assets makes it more likely that the firm will face shortage costs. For example, if the firm runs out of inventory of raw materials, it may have to shut down production. Similarly, a producer holding a small finished goods inventory is more likely to be caught short, unable to fill orders promptly. There are also disadvantages to holding small “inventories” of cash. If the firm runs out of cash, it may have to sell securities and incur unnecessary trading costs. The firm may also maintain too low a level of accounts receivable. If the firm tries to minimize accounts receivable by restricting credit sales, it may lose customers.
An important job of the financial manager is to strike a balance between the
costs and benefits of current assets, that is, to find the level of current assets
that minimizes the sum of carrying costs and shortage costs.
In the Appendix we pointed out that in recent years many managers have tried to
make their staff more aware of the cost of the capital that is used in the business. So, when they review the performance of each part of their business, they deduct the cost of the capital employed from its profits. This measure is known as residual income or economic value added (EVA), which is the term coined by the consulting firm Stern Stewart. Firms that employ EVA to measure performance have often discovered that they can make large savings on working capital. Herman Miller Corporation, the furniture manufacturer, found that after it introduced EVA, employees became much more conscious of the cash tied up in inventories.
The company also started to look at how rapidly customers paid their bills. It found that, any time an item was missing from an order, the customer would delay payment until all the pieces had been delivered. When the company cleared up the problem of missing items, it made its customers happier and it collected the cash faster.

Measuring Company Performance

The book value of the company’s equity is equal to the total amount that the company has raised from its shareholders or retained and reinvested on their behalf. If the company has been successful in adding value, the market value of the equity will be higher than the book value. So investors are likely to look favorably on the managers of firms that have a high ratio of market to book value and to frown upon firms whose market value is less than book value. Of course, the market to book ratio does not tell you just how much richer the shareholders have become. Take the General Electric Company, for example. At the end of 1997 the book value of GE’s equity was $59 billion, but investors valued its shares at $255 billion. So every dollar that GE invested on behalf of
its shareholders had increased 4.3 times in value (255/59 = 4.3). The difference between the market value of GE’s shares and its book value is often called the market value added. GE had added $255 – $59 = $196 billion to the equity capital that it had invested.
Each year Fortune Magazine publishes a ranking of 1,000 firms in terms of their
market value added. Table A.15 shows the companies at the top and bottom of Fortune’s list and, for comparison, Pepsi. You can see that General Electric heads the list in terms of market value added. General Motors trails the field: the market value of GM’s shares was $14 billion less than the amount of shareholders’ money that GM had invested.
Measures of company performance that are based on market values have two disadvantages. First, the market value of the company’s shares reflects investor expectations.
Investors placed a high value on General Electric’s shares partly because they believed that its management would continue to find profitable investments in the future. Second, market values cannot be used to judge the performance of companies that are privately owned or the performance of divisions or plants that are part of larger companies. Therefore, financial managers also calculate accounting measures of performance.
Think again of how a firm creates value for its investors. It can either invest in new plant and equipment or it can return the cash to investors, who can then invest the money for themselves by buying stocks and bonds in the capital market. The return that investors could expect to earn if they invested in the capital market is called the cost of capital. A firm that earns more than the cost of capital makes its investors better off: it is earning them a higher return than they could obtain for themselves. A firm that earns less than the cost of capital makes investors worse off: they could earn a higher return simply by investing their cash in the capital market. Naturally, therefore, financial managers are concerned whether the firm’s return on its assets exceeds or falls short of the
cost of capital. Look, for example, at the third column of Table A.15, which shows the return on assets for our sample of companies. Microsoft had the highest return on assets at nearly 53 percent. Since the cost of capital for Microsoft was probably around 14 percent, each dollar invested by Microsoft was earning almost four times the return that investors could have expected by investing in the capital market.

Let us work out how much this amounted to. Microsoft’s total capital in 1997 was $7.2 billion. With a return of 53 percent, it earned profits on this figure of 53 × 7.2 = $3.8 billion. The total cost of the capital employed by Microsoft was about .14 × 7.2 =$1.0 billion. So after deducting the cost of capital, Microsoft earned 3.8 – 1.0 = $2.8 billion. This is called Microsoft’s residual income. It is also known as economic value added, or EVA, a term coined by the consultancy firm Stern Stewart, which has done much to develop and promote the concept.
The final column of Table A.15 shows the economic value added for our sample of large companies. You can see, for example, that while GE has a far lower return on assets than Microsoft, the two companies are close in terms of EVA. This is partly because GE was less risky and investors did not require such a high return, but also because GE had far more dollars invested than Microsoft. General Motors is the laggard in the EVA stakes. Its positive return on assets indicates that the company earned a profit after deducting out-of-pocket costs. But this profit is calculated before deducting the cost of capital. GM’s residual income (or EVA) was negative at –$4.1 billion. Residual income or EVA is a better measure of a company’s performance than accounting profits. Profits are calculated after deducting all costs except the cost of capital. EVA recognizes that companies need to cover their cost of capital before they add value. If a plant or division is not earning a positive EVA, its management is likely
to face some pointed questions about whether the assets could be better employed elsewhere or by fresh management. Therefore, a growing number of firms now calculate EVA and tie managers’ compensation to it.
The Role of Financial Ratios In this material we have encountered a number of measures of a firm’s financial position. Many of these were in the form of ratios; some, such as market value added and economic value added, were measured in dollars.
Before we leave the topic it might be helpful to emphasize the role of such accounting measures. Whenever two managers get together to discuss the state of the business, there is a good bet that they will refer to financial ratios. Let’s drop in on two conversations.
Conversation 1. The CEO was musing out loud: “How are we going to finance this expansion? Would the banks be happy to lend us the $30 million that we need?”

“I’ve been looking into that,” the financial manager replies. “Our current debt ratio is. If we borrow the full cost of the project, the ratio would be about .45. When we took out our last loan from the bank, we agreed that we would not allow our debt ratio to get above 5. So if we borrow to finance this project, we wouldn’t have much leeway to respond to possible emergencies. Also, the rating agencies currently give our bonds an investment-grade rating. They too look at a company’s leverage when they rate its bonds. I have a table here (Table A.16) which shows that, when firms are highly leveraged, their bonds receive a lower rating. I don’t know whether the rating agencies would downgrade our bonds if our debt ratio increased to .45, but they might. That wouldn’t please our existing bondholders, and it could raise the cost of any new borrowing.
“We also need to think about our interest cover, which is beginning to look a bit thin. Debt interest is currently covered three times and, if we borrowed the entire $30 million, interest cover would fall to about two times. Sure, we expect to earn additional profits on the new investment but it could be several years before they come through. If we run into a recession in the meantime, we could find ourselves short of cash.”
“Sounds to me as if we should be thinking about a possible equity issue,” concluded the CEO.
Conversation 2. The CEO was not in the best of moods after his humiliating defeat at the company golf tournament by the manager of the packaging division: “I see our stock was down again yesterday,” he growled. “It’s now selling below book value and the stock price is only six times earnings. I work my socks off for this company; you would think that our stockholders would show a little more gratitude.”
“I think I can understand a little of our shareholders’ worries,” the financial manager replies. “Just look at our return on assets. It’s only 6 percent, well below the cost of capital. Sure we are making a profit, but that profit does not cover the cost of the funds that investors provide. Our economic value added is actually negative. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the assets could be used better elsewhere, but we should certainly be looking carefully at whether any of our divisions should be sold off or the assets redeployed.
“In some ways we’re in good shape. We have very little short-term debt and our current assets are three times our current liabilities. But that’s not altogether good news because it also suggests that we may have more working capital than we need. I’ve been looking at our main competitors. They turn over their inventory 12 times a year compared with our figure of just 8 times. Also, their customers take an average of 45 days to pay their bills. Ours take 67. If we could just match their performance on these two measures, we would release $300 million that could be paid out to shareholders.”
“Perhaps we could talk more about this tomorrow,” said the CEO. “In the meantime I intend to have a word with the production manager about our inventory levels and with the credit manager about our collections policy. You’ve also got me thinking about whether we should sell off our packaging division. I’ve always worried about the divisional manager there. Spends too much time practicing his backswing and not enough worrying about his return on assets.”

Using Financial Ratios

Many years ago a British bank chairman observed that not only did the bank’s accounts show its true position but the actual situation was a little better still. Since that time accounting standards have been much more carefully defined, but companies still have considerable discretion in calculating profits and deciding what to show in the balance sheet. Thus when you calculate financial ratios, you need to look below the surface and understand some of the pitfalls of accounting data. The nearby box discusses some ways in which companies can manipulate reported earnings.
For example, the assets shown in Pepsi’s 1998 balance sheet include a figure of
$8,996 for “intangibles.” The major intangible consists of “goodwill,” which is the difference between the amount that Pepsi paid when it acquired several companies and the book value of their assets. Pepsi writes off a proportion of this goodwill from each year’s profits. We don’t want to debate whether goodwill is really an asset, but we should warn you about the dangers of comparing ratios of firms whose balance sheets include a substantial goodwill element with those that do not.
Another pitfall arises because many of the company’s liabilities are not shown in the balance sheet at all. For example, the liabilities include leases that meet certain tests—for example, leases lasting more than 75 percent of the leased asset’s life. But a lease lasting only 74 percent of asset life escapes the net and is shown only in the footnotes to the financial statements. Read the footnotes carefully; if you take the balance sheet uncritically, you may miss important obligations of the company.

CHOOSING A BENCHMARK
We have shown you how to calculate the principal financial ratios for Pepsi. In practice you may not need to calculate all of them, because many measure essentially the same thing. For example, if you know that Pepsi’s EBIT is 8.0 times interest payments and that the company is financed 39 percent with long-term debt, the other leverage ratios are of relatively little interest.
Once you have selected and calculated the important ratios, you still need some way of judging whether they are high or low. A good starting point is to compare them with the equivalent figures for the same company in earlier years. For example, you can see from the first two columns of Table A.13 that while Pepsi was somewhat more profitable in 1998 than in the previous year, it was also substantially less liquid. It had negative working capital and a much lower cash ratio than in 1997.
It is also helpful to compare Pepsi’s financial position with that of other firms. However, you would not expect companies in different industries to have similar ratios. For example, a soft drink manufacturer is unlikely to have the same profit margin as a jeweler or the same leverage as a finance company. It makes sense, therefore, to limit comparison to other firms in the same industry. For example, the third column of Table A.13 shows the financial ratios for Coca-Cola, Pepsi’s main competitor.12 Notice that Coke is also operating with negative working capital, but, unlike Pepsi, it has very little longterm debt.

When making these comparisons remember our earlier warning about the need to dig behind the figures. For example, we noted earlier that Pepsi’s balance sheet contains a large entry for goodwill; Coke’s doesn’t, which partly explains why Coke has the higher return on assets.
Financial ratios for industries are published by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Dun & Bradstreet, Robert Morris Associates, and others.

Think of a Number

The quality of mercy is not strain’d; the quality of American corporate profits is another matter. There may be a lot less to the published figures than meets the eye. Warren Buffett, America’s most admired investor, certainly thinks so. As he sagely put it recently, “ A growing number of otherwise high-grade managers— CEOs you would be happy to have as spouses for your children or as trustees under your will— have come to the view that it is OK to manipulate earnings to satisfy what they believe are Wall Street’s desires. Indeed many CEOs think this kind of manipulation is not only OK, but actually their duty.”
The question is: do they under- or overstate profits? Unfortunately different ruses have different effects. Take first those designed to flatter profits. Thanks mainly to a furious lobbying effort by bosses, stock options are not counted as a cost. Smithers & Co., a London-based research firm, calculated the cost of these options and concluded that the American companies granting them had overstated their profits by as much as half in the 1998 financial year; overall, ignoring stock-option costs has exaggerated American profits as a whole by one to three percentage points every year since 1994.
Then there are corporate pension funds. The value of these has soared thanks to the stock market’s vertiginous rise and, as a result, some pension plans have be-
come overfunded (assets exceed liabilities). Firms can include this pension surplus as a credit in their income statements. Over $1 billion of General Electric’s reported pretax profits of $13.8 billion in 1998 were “ earned” in this way. The rising value of financial assets has allowed many firms to reduce, or even skip, their annual pension-fund contributions, boosting profits. As
pension-fund contributions will almost certainly have to be resumed when the bull market ends, this probably paints a misleading impression of the long-term trend of profitability.
Mr. Buffett is especially critical of another way of dampening current profits to the benefit of future ones: restructuring charges (the cost, taken in one go, of a
corporate reorganization). Firms may be booking much bigger restructuring charges than they should, creating a reserve of money to draw on to boost profits in a difficult future year.