FIN 330 Final Project I Milestone One Guidelines and Rubric Overview: Corporate financial managers must have a business-wide perspective to successfully navigate the corporate environment. The skills you develop in this course will support you in your future business career as well as set the foundation for the concepts that will be covered in the next course, FIN 336: Multinational Corporate Finance. Your final projects for FIN 330 will allow you to showcase your mastery of the varied skills a finance professional must obtain by requiring you to analyze a real-world corporation from a quantitative perspective while also investigating the challenges and decisions a manager must face. As such, your assessment will be broken up into two separate but related final projects. The first project, a corporate valuation report, will focus on a U. S. corporation of your choice. You will analyze the historical financials of your chosen corporation, using the provided Excel template, and estimate the value of your corporation in a brief report. The second project is a risk management and ethical analysis report, which will focus on the same corporation, highlighting the management and leadership considerations and decisions required of top-level financial managers. In this written report, you will discuss ethics, corporate social responsibility, and challenges related to attaining short-term and long-term goals. Combined, these two projects will assess your learning regarding the quantitative and qualitative concepts of corporate finance and leadership. Prompt: This milestone requires you to write a draft of the Overview and Financial History sections (Sections I and II) of Final Project I, the corporate valuation report. This milestone requires you to select and focus on a specific corporation of interest for the larger final projects. To support your selection, you are encouraged to use Mergent Online. Refer to the provided Mergent Online Instructions for assistance in navigating Mergent Online. Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed in this milestone: I. Overview: This section of your report will be devoted to providing a thorough overview of the background of the corporation you selected and setting the foundation for your later discussion of the challenges financial managers face. Specifically, you must address the following: A. Describe the market to which your corporation belongs, identifying the products or services your corporation sells, and the share of the market it has. B. Describe the customer base of your corporation and the top competitors for this customer base. Be sure to consider what motivates the customers and the challenges the organization faces in retaining the customer base. C. Describe the key inputs and sources of those inputs used to create the products or services as well as the key resources for corporate operation (such as staff, facilities, technologies, etc.) and the extent to which attaining all these resources presents a challenge to the particular organization. D. Analyze key market trends and issues within the industry for potential risks to the organization. II. Financial History: The next section of your report should focus on the financial history and capital structure of your organization. A. Quantitatively analyze three years of the corporation’s finances using the provided Excel template. You will submit this template along with your report, and may embed pieces of the Excel template into your report to show key financial highlights for the following section. Please note that, for this assignment, you only need to complete the “Financial History” tab in the spreadsheet. B. Summarize the financial highlights you determined from the analysis in the Excel template, explaining the significance of the key ratios for the overall financial health of the organization. Guidelines for Submission: Your Overview and Financial History should be 3–4 pages in length, not including the Excel template you use to address section II.A, above. The written submission should use 12-point Times New Roman font, double spacing, one-inch margins, and APA formatting. Be sure to submit both your written response and the completed Excel template when submitting this assignment. Any citations should follow APA guidelines. Critical Elements Overview: Market Overview: Customer Proficient (100%) Accurately describes the market, products or services, and portion of the market held by the chosen corporation Accurately describes the customer base and the corporation’s top competitors for those customers Overview: Resources Accurately describes the key inputs and resources the corporation needs Overview: Trends Critically analyzes the market for key trends and issues that may pose risks for the corporation Financial History: Excel Correctly analyzes three years of corporate financial statements using the provided Excel template Needs Improvement (80%) Describes the market, products or services, and portion of the market held by the chosen corporation, but lacks accuracy or necessary detail Describes the customer base and the corporation’s top competitors for those customers, but lacks accuracy or detail Describes the key inputs and resources the corporation needs, but lacks accuracy or detail Analyzes the market for key trends and issues, but lacks detail, logic, or focus on issues that may pose risks for the corporation Analyzes three years of corporate financial statements using the provided Excel template, but analysis contains miscalculations or is incomplete Not Evident (0%) Does not describe the market, products or services, and portion of the market held by the chosen corporation Does not describe the customer base and the corporation’s top competitors Value 13 14 Does not describe inputs and resources the corporation needs 15 Does not analyze the market for trends and issues 13 Does not analyze three years of corporate financial statements using the provided Excel template 20 Financial History: Highlights Articulation of Response Accurately summarizes the financial highlights determined from the Excel analysis of the corporate financial statements, citing key ratios that give a picture of the overall financial health Submission has no major errors related to citations, grammar, spelling, syntax, or organization Summarizes the financial highlights determined from the Excel analysis of the corporate financial statements, but lacks accuracy or details regarding key ratios that give a picture of the overall financial health Submission has major errors related to citations, grammar, spelling, syntax, or organization that negatively impact readability and articulation of main ideas Does not summarize the financial highlights determined from the Excel analysis 20 Submission has critical errors related to citations, grammar, spelling, syntax, or organization that prevent understanding of ideas 5 Total 100% FIN 330 Mergent Online Instructions Financial information for publicly traded companies is available to the public and can be found on a domestic company’s 10-K Annual Report on the company’s investor relations page (e.g., http://investor.apple.com/financials.cfm), on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) website under Filings, and on many other financial sites, including Yahoo! Finance. Mergent Online is a financial industry tool available to SNHU students for free. Here is a video demonstration that guides you through how to find financial information on Mergent Online. To Access Mergent Online: 1. Log in to Brightspace. 2. Click on the Online Student Services tab at the top of the page, and under Academic Support, click on the Shapiro Library link. 3. Click on the A-Z Database List link on the left-hand side of the page. 4. In the Search for Databases field, enter Mergent Online. Click on go, then click on Mergent Online in the results. 5. Alternatively, you can access Mergent Online directly here. To Find a Publicly Traded Company: 1. In the top left-hand section, locate the Company Search - Enter symbol or Company Name field. Type a company name into the search box and wait a few moments until a drop-down menu of company names appears. 2. If a company is publicly traded (meaning its stock trades on an exchange where you can buy and sell shares), its stock ticker symbol and name will appear in the drop-down list below. 3. Click on the company name in the drop-down list. This will bring you to the company’s landing page. Read the company’s Business Summary to confirm this is the company you intended to search for. 4. Review the information in the blue box at the top of the page and make note of the company’s assigned Sector and Industry. To Find a Company’s Historical Stock Prices: 1. Click on the Equity Pricing tab in the top navigation menu. 2. The Time Period defaults to three years. 3. Click on the Report link (located above the Controls box). 4. Once the Historical Pricing page has loaded, click the Download button on the top right of the screen. 5. Save the Excel file to your computer. 6. Use the Close Price to calculate the percent increase or decrease in the stock price over the seven weekday or three-year period. For example, Apple’s stock price on 8/19/16 closed at $109.36. Seven weekdays earlier, on 8/11/16, it closed at $107.93. If you had bought 100 shares of Apple stock on 8/11/16 at $107.93 and sold them on 8/19/16 at $109.36, you would have earned $143 before taxes, which is a 1.32% rate of return. The calculation is (109.36-107.93)/107.93 x 100, which equals 1.32%. Apple’s stock price closed on 8/19/2013 at $72.53, making the three-year rate of return 50.77%. To Download Financial Statement Data: 1. Click on the Company Financials tab in the top navigation menu. 2. The company's Balance Sheet data will appear; it defaults to annual. 3. Five years’ worth of data will appear by default. You can change the settings to display three years of data by selecting the 3 Years/Quarters option in the drop-down menu to the right of the Annuals and Balance Sheet menus. Then, click the Refresh button at the end of the next row. 4. Click the Download button on the top right of the screen. 5. Save the Excel file to your computer. 6. To get your other financial statements, change the drop-down menu that displays Balance Sheet to Income Statement and then Cash Flow. Follow the same steps outlined above to retrieve the data files. To Find a Competitor: 1. Click on the Competitors tab in the top navigation menu. 2. Select Public Global at the top of the list of companies. 3. Click on a company name’s to review its Business Summary and confirm this is the company you are interested in. 4. Review the company’s Sector and Industry listed at the top and determine if you want to use this competitor for your competitive analysis. To Find Industry Data: 1. Click on the Competitors tab in the top navigation menu. 2. Select Public Global at the top of the list of companies. 3. Choose at least five competitors. 4. For each competitor, click on the company name’s to review its Business Summary and confirm this is the company you are interested in. Review the company’s Sector and Industry listed at the top and determine if you want to use this competitor for your industry analysis. 5. Determine what financial indicators you would like to compare and collect the needed data from the company financial statements for your ratio or free cash flow (FCF) calculations. 6. Average your calculated results to get an industry average (for example, add the five company’s free cash flow calculations together and then divide by five).
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