Purpose of Assignment

Students should understand how to use the financial information and tools learned in the class on a public company, obtain public company SEC reports, and use that data to calculate a company's financial ratios and their comparison to industry or competitor standards.

Assignment Steps

Resources: Tutorial help on Excel and Word functions can be found on the MicrosoftOffice website. There are also additional tutorials via the web that offer support for office products.

Select one of the publicly traded corporations listed below and obtain the most current SEC Form 10-K (annual financial report) from the company's web site (Do not use the Annual Report that is sent to shareholders):

Lowes Corporation

Kroger Corporation

Harley Davidson Corporation

Apple Corporation

Intel Corporation

Marriott Corporation MARRIOTT !!

Berkshire Hathaway Corporation

PepsiCo Corporation

Procter and Gamble Corporation

General Electric Corporation

USE MARRIOTT PLEASE

Calculate and analyze the following ratios for your selected company for the last two years from the SEC Form 10-K:

Current Ratio

Inventory Turnover

Debt Ratio

Time Interest Earned

Gross Profit Margin

Equity Multiplier

Return on Assets

Net Profit Margin

Return on Equity (Use three ratio DuPont method)

Compare and contrast your company's ratios to industry and competitor standard ratios obtained from Yahoo Finance, Morningstar, MotleyFool, Macroaxis or other Internet sources, and provide a detailed answer and analysis as to why your company's ratios are different than the industry/competitor standard.

Prepare your analysis in a minimum of 875 words in Microsoft Word. The use of Microsoft®Word tables is encouraged.

Cite the source of the industry/competitor ratio information.

Format your assignment consistent with APA guidelines.