Following are the net earnings of four large companies for the fiscal years from 1999 to 2002. These amounts are in thousands of dollars.

Required:

Based on this information alone, decide which of the companies you think would present the best in¬ vestment opportunity for the future and which would be the worst. Write a briefmemorandum support¬ ing your choices, and show any computations that you used to reach your conclusions. As part of your analysis, compute the annual growth rates for each company’s earnings. To do this, compute by what percentage each company’s earnings increased or decreased from the year before. You will not be able to compute a growth rate for 1999 since the earnings for 1998 are not given. Perform whatever additional analysis you think is useful.

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Net Earnings in $000 Company Industry 2002 2001 2000 1999 Autozone Kohl's Automobile parts retailer Department store chain. $428,148 643,381 $175,526 $267,590 $244,783 Oshkosh B'Gosh Children's clothing Peoplesoft Software development 32,045 182,589 495,676 372,148 258,142 32,808 32,217 32,448 191,554 145,691 (177,765)