Reference no: EM131434724

Continuing with your Week 2 Project, now your CEO after reviewing your earlier Week 2 PowerPoint submission has asked your team to complete an additional benchmark analysis task, before the upcoming Board Meeting. For this part of the project your team needs to do an analysis of the market and operational characteristics of your company and its financial profile. For this project, your team will need to select four companies that are direct competitors of your company. This sample selection should be based on revenue, profitability, market capitalization, market segment and product characteristics.

This project is an additional benchmark data analytics project. The objective of this part of the project will be to do a comparative financial analysis of your company with the averages of the sample of four companies that will form your comparative group.

The project deliverables will be another PowerPoint presentation to the CEO explaining the financial performance of your company compared to the sample of four comparable companies. The analysis should include the following deliverables:

1. An explanation of the logic of the selection of the four comparable group companies. Why were these companies selected?

2. Your team's data extraction strategy, process and methodology.

3. A financial comparison of your company to the average of the comparator group on the following financial factors.

a. Profitability

b. Debt Management

c. Liquidity

d. Asset Management

e. Value Creation - based on a the 3-year trend in Free Cash Flow

In order to complete this project, your team has to select which ratios you are going to use in each of the five categories given above. In addition to that, your team will have to briefly explain why you are selecting the ratios you are using in your benchmark study.

Then your team will have to collect the financial data for your company and the financial data of the four competitor companies. The data can be collected from two financial data bases such as, Yahoo Finance, Lexis Nexis, Plunkett, or bizstats.com. Your team will then have to collect and calculate the averages of the four competitor companies.  (Please note that no ratio calculations are required for each company, the ratios should be readily available on the websites noted above. You will only need to calculate the average ratios for the four companies combined.)

Your team will proceed to developing a PowerPoint presentation presenting the comparison and your team's commentary of what your team discerns from the comparison. PowerPoint should not have more than ten slides. Just like the previous project your team should use Webex or Voicethread, and prepare an oral presentation that presents your PowerPoint presentation. Each team member must participate in this presentation.