- Comparison of companies: Ratio analysis help companies to compare their company size, growth, market share and market position with other companies. For example: Walmart compare their market share with other retail store such as target, Sam’s club, Costco.
Limitations of Financial Ratio
Financial ratio analysis is useful tool that lots of investor, analyst and creditors use to analyze company’s financial health, however despite of usefulness financial ratio has some limitations that analyst have to be aware while calculating financial ratio (Jan, 2018). Following are some of the important limitation that is associated with financial ratio (Bragg, 2018).
- Inflation: financial statement is made over period of time. Sometime due to the inflation
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Walmart is one of the largest growing company with market share 11.4% as compare to target which has only 2.4% market share (Mirzayev, 2015). To analyze Walmart versus Target, investor have to look for the historical performance over period of time. Historical data provide information on how well company is performing. Some financial ratio that investor might use are profitability ratio and debt to equity ratio. Profitability ratio helps investor to analyze how much profit business make after all expenses. Walmart have total assets 203 billion which is about 5 times larger than target which has $41.4 Billion but if we compare these two company together, target has higher profit margin than Walmart (Mirzayev, 2015). Walmart pursue lower – cost strategy, where as target pursue differentiation strategy. The percentage help to indicate how well companies are performing in real world. Liquidity ratio shows that Walmart and target have to pay its debt obligation. In this figure, we can see target of higher current ratio that means target have greater ability to pay its debt as compare to Walmart. As compare to Walmart ratio, Target have better profit margin and better liquidity management. on the other hand, Walmart has 2.41% asset turnover compare to Target which only has 1.72%, so target need to focus more on product efficiency …show more content…
Investor have to look for their competitor performance through yahoo finance or google finance. Yahoo finance is the helpful source that gives all the information about different companies’ performance. To avoid error investor, have to use accurate data, and instead doing manually calculation, investors have to keep record all data safely in excel file. Excel is most reliable tool that lots of financial industries use to calculate their numbers without having any error. Sometimes, market value ratio would be the alternative for ratio analysis because it provides most accurate data and company not only have to rely on historical