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Financial analysis of mark & spencer’s latest company accounts 2017 and 2016

M&S is one of the UK’s leading retailers. The company is committed to making every moment special for customers by providing high quality branded food, apparel and home products distributed via over 1433 stores around the world.

Making every moment special is also an ultimate aim of the food business, which constitutes over 60% of the company’s turnover in the UK (M&S, 2017). Our innovative, quality and variety of offers forces our client to choose us on every special occasion regardless of their needs.

Our business model is designed to deliver virtually every kind of item being used in a daily life. The company has been engaged in selling high quality, own brand clothing and homeware via 343 full-line stores, outlets and through an online website.Financial analysis of mark & spencer’s latest company accounts 2017 and 2016

The entire report would be based on analysing financial performance of M&S employing ratio analysis. Each of the ratio categories would be investigated in depth with the comparison of the industry trend. In the end conclusion with the suggested recommendations would be stated.

Critical review

Financial analysis of a company is done to judge the extent to which company has been efficient in using assets, shareholder equity and liability, turnover etc. Ratio analysis is one of the best tool used to evaluate the performance of a company (Bülow, 2017).

Profitability, efficiency, liquidity, and investor’s ratios help in judging the operation and management capabilities in terms of profit being earned and expenses being incurred.

Financial analysis of mark & spencer’s latest company accounts 2017 and 2016. In this report, ratio analysis has been used to assess the short-term liquidity position, asset utilization capabilities, profitability, and gearing level of Marks and Spencer.

In order to become profitable, an entity would have to keep its assets and expenses under budgeted guidelines (Damodaran, 2016).

Liquidity ratios would assess the short-term debt paying ability to meet working capital requirement. It would help in making a comparison with regard to the efficiency and performance of a company.

Investor ratios would determine the share performance as to the how much equity investors would be willing to buy company’s stock (Asquith, and Weiss, 2016).

It would also elaborate the dividend paying ability and pattern being followed with regard to the dividend payment history.

Past financial performance and future growth pattern could also be analysed by conducting a thorough financial ratio analysis.

The phrase accounting ratio is used to signify the linkage between financial position and financial performance in a budgetary control environment.

The relationship is expressed in simple mathematical terms and is used to portray financial condition and operating effectiveness of a company (Minnis and Sutherland, 2017).

However, a single isolated figure would be meaningless and could never provide a complete picture. It only becomes relevant when compared with the similar ratios within the industry over a particular period of time.

The perfect analogy would be that it is a diagnostic test (McCall, 2017). A single diagnostic test could never portray the detailed account unless compared with the tests conducted at a different point in time to gauge the pattern.

Ratio analysis is a convenient way of diverting the investigator’s focus to the particular relationships worth elaborating. It centres on the efforts to extract quantitative measures and signals the anticipated capability of an entity to meet its short-term obligations (Boyas and Teeter, 2017).

The financial statements generally contain numerous related and unrelated figures that have to be linked properly to ascertain the overall relationship with the business’s operations.

Ratio analysis creates the likelihood of an expanded assessment as when one or two ratios are not making any sense, additional ratios are calculated to make the interpretation more relevant and elaborate.

Ratios are always compared over time as done in this report. In order to display past trend, two years data have been incorporated to study the pattern more in-depth (Goldmann, 2017).

This way it would be easy to highlight increase or decrease in comparison to the last year performance.

Inter-firm comparison within the same industry is the best way to revise the benchmark as most issues being faced by all the companies remains the same within the same sector.

Ratio analysis is an excellent tool to control the entire business and be prepared for future needs. Ratio analysis makes it simple to comprehend the financial statements. It determines the story in detail as to the reason of a change in any particular figure by tracing its source.

Any company employing ratio analysis could easily compare its ranking in the industry with regard to its competitors by matching the calculated values with the industry averages (Zainudin et al., 2016).

It helps in pointing out the reason for the firms that have been successful so that meaningful conclusions could be drawn.

Performance estimation also becomes relatively easy by predicting the future trend. Over the particular period of time, industry develops certain norms that could easily be predicted numerically employing ratio analysis. The future……