Group Portion:

Library Research Assignment

The next day, the CFO asks you, your new financial analyst, and the firm's marketing manager to come to his office. He hands you a file of financial statements from the company's two competitors in the computer hardware industry. He says that the CEO has requested a report analyzing the company's two main competitor's financial statements and predicting their next big moves. In turn, this will provide him with some guidance on how to prepare a counterstrategy in the coming year for your company.

He requests that the team do the following:

• Decide on the 5 ratios that you will use to monitor the health of your 2 competitor companies.
• Find the most recent financial statements for both computer hardware industry competitors.
  • The easiest Web site to use is www.msn.com. Type in the company symbol and go to "financial results" on the left side of the screen.
• Calculate (or find already calculated for you) the same 5 ratios you decided on for each of the 2 computer hardware industry competitor companies.
• Write a report of 600750 words to your CEO (with charts and/or tables) including the following:
  • the results of the 2 competitor company's ratios, including citations and references
  • an interpretation of the health of each company based on the ratios for each company
  • Use the ratio results to make predictions about what each competitor company will do to improve each of those 5 ratios in the coming year.
  • List and explain at least 2 specific challenges that the competitor company's managers may face when trying to improve these ratios.
  • Completely and solely based on the team's research, ratio calculations, and predictions, explain which company the team believes is the stronger competitor your company faces, and why