FINANCE ASSIGNMENT

Please answer the questions below. Use either the Bloomberg terminals located at the Feliciano School of Business or other reputable sources such as finance.yahoo.com, morningstar.com or Wall Street Journal etc. for the financial data you use in your answers.

You need to provide the references regarding the financial data you use to support your answers at the end of the finance portion of the term paper.

Questions:

1. Starting service to a new market, such as Havana, Cuba, is a major capital budgeting project for Southwest Airlines (ticker symbol: LUV).

A project of this scale requires coordinated planning across all functions of a business that you are studying in your Integrated Core classes.

Choose and discuss three items on the income statement and balance sheet that you think will be impacted by this new undertaking (a total of six items).

Explain why you chose those particular items, and how those items are impacted by the marketing, management and operations decisions of the company.

2. Explain how the financial decisions regarding starting service to Cuba are related to management, marketing or operations decisions that the company must make (or has made)?

3. Choose and calculate five ratios for this company for the last two years. Make sure to select ratios that you think would be impacted by starting new service to Cuba, and explain your reasoning.

Identify two competitors of LUV and contrast the ratios. Explain why you selected those competitors. Describe how the decisions made by management, marketing and operations functions of the company can impact, and hopefully improve, these financial ratios.

4. Calculate the annualized stock price return of LUV over the last 3, 5, and 10 years. How does it compare to the return of the competitors you selected in question 3 and the S&P 500 index over the same time periods?

What kind of steps can the company take regarding management strategy, operational efficiency and marketing policy to maintain the strong performance of this company going forward?