Financial Statement Analysis & Industrial Benchmarking of Home Depot and Lowe's Companies Inc.

Analysis of Income Statements, Balance Sheets, Statement of Cash Flows and Ratios
• Individual task

• Students should provide an industrial comparative analysis of two publicly traded company (The Home Depot & Lowe’s companies Inc.) in the same industry, using financial statements, annual reports and other available industrial and financial information.

• Key contextual elements should include the three compulsory financial statements: Income Statement, Balance Sheet and the Cash Flow Statement. Also,other important data from the Annual Report together with industrial benchmarking using ratio analysis, that demonstrate a clear understanding of the learning objectives discussed up to week 8 of this course.

• Title page, Written Body, along with a Bibliography of any written references, images, or diagrams used (if applicable). NOTE: Formal Written Reports must include a Title Page, Table of Contents, and Appendix of Financial Statements.

• Formal Written Report saved and uploaded to Moodle in PDF format.

• Review and compare the financial statements and annual reports of The Home Depot and of Lowe’s companies Inc. of fiscal year 2012, in comparison to fiscal 2011, according to the below structure and questions:

Analyze the balance sheet of both companies. Write a summary that includes important points about each company that an analyst would use in assessing the financial condition of The Home Depot and of Lowe’s as one of its competitors.

Analyze the income statement of The Home Depot and of Lowe’s. Write a summary that includes important points that an analyst would use in
assessing the profitability of The Home Depot and of Lowe’s as one of its competitors.

Analyze the consolidated statements of cash flows for The Home Depot and for Lowe’s for fiscal years 2012, 2011 and 2010. Write a summary
that includes important points that an analyst would use in assessing the companies’ relative abilities to generate cash flows and the appropriateness of the use of cash flows

Using data, common size statements, ratio and trend calculations for The Home Depot and Lowe’s, write a comprehensive comparative analysis of the companies over the major areas: Short term liquidity, operating efficiency, capital structure and long term solvency, and profitability.

Perform the Dupont analysis and compare variation of The Home Depot and Lowe’s ROE, Return on Equity, as the combined effect of profitability, liquidity, and financial leverage.

Formalities:
• Word count: 2000/2500 words
• Cover, Table of Contents, References and Appendix are excluded of the total word count.
• Font: Arial 12,5 pts.
• Text alignment: Justified.

• The in-text References and the Bibliography have to be in Harvard’s citation style Weight: This task represents 60% of your total grade for this subject. It assesses the following learning outcomes:

• Outcome 1: Develop a deep understanding on how to benchmark companies in similar industries and form opinions as to the relative strength of one company versus another supporting these opinions with financial data.
• Outcome 2: Critically evaluate financial ratios.
• Outcome 3: Demonstrate a deep understanding of the tools of analysis in financial statement analysis.