Simple Finance Assignment

Part 1

Required:

Tazzan Investment Holdings (TiH) is a UK based service provider to a wide range of national and international clients. High on the agenda of the company this season is investment enquiry from an international client focusing on business opportunities in Singapore. As a newly recruited member of staff, you have been assigned the responsibility to research and report on a selection of companies.

(a) Evaluate the performance of the following Singapore Stock Exchange listed companies:

 

  1. Keppel Corporation
  2. Sembawang Corporation

 

With the aid of DuPont and other techniques, your report should provide a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the chosen company’s financial and non-financial performance. Make recommendations in the light of your analysis.

The evaluation must cover among others, revenues, costs, profitability, working capital management, etc.

 

 

(b) “The balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government, and nonprofit organizations worldwide to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization, improve internal and external communications, and monitor organization performance against strategic goals” (Balanced Scorecard Institute).

 

Design a Balanced Scorecard for one of the companies in (a) based on Kaplan and Norton’s (1992) frameworks including the Strategy Map and briefly explain the designed Strategy Map in light of the quote above.

Your report should be supported with graphs, tables and academic references. The use of database research and management information systems such as Bloomberg, Fame, Osiris, etc., can be helpful and is permitted for the purpose of this assignment.

Part 2

“The financial methods (of capital budgeting) can be grouped into two basic classes – sophisticated and naive selection techniques. Sophisticated techniques are those that consider the risk adjusted discounted net cash flows expected from a project. In contrast naive methods generally do not use cash flow.”

Susan F. Haka, Lawrence A. Gordon and George E. Pinches, Sophisticated Capital Budgeting Techniques and Firm Performance, The Accounting Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), pp. 651-669.

 

Required

Suggest a possible long-term investment opportunity* for a company of your choice, and in the context of above explanation by Haka et al (1985), critically evaluate techniques which may be used to assist in the decision-making process**.

* Your chosen company should be a real one. It is not necessary to provide extensive detail of either the company or the investment in question, but merely to provide an example to give your work a context.

** You should not merely explain how various measures are calculated, but rather should critically evaluate their potential usefulness for managers responsible for taking investment decisions in the context of wealth creation.

Word limits (3,500) and penalties for assignments

 

APA referencing format.