How to Read the Annual Report of a Company
What is an Annual Report?
The annual report (AR) is a yearly publication by the company and is sent to the shareholders and other interested parties. The annual report is published by the end of the Financial Year, and all the data made available in the annual report is dated to 31st March. The AR is usually available on the company’s website (in the investors section) as a PDF document or one can contact the company to get a hard copy of the same.
Since the annual report is published by the company, whatever is mentioned in the AR is assumed to be official. Hence, any misrepresentation of facts in the annual report can be held against the company. To give you a perspective, AR contains the auditor’s certificates (signed, dated, and sealed) certifying the sanctity of the financial data included in the annual report.
Potential investors and the present shareholders are the primary audience for the annual report. Annual reports should provide the most pertinent information to an investor and should also communicate the company’s primary message. For an investor, the annual report must be the default option to seek information about a company. Of course there are many media websites claiming to give the financial information about the company; however the investors should avoid seeking information from such sources. Remember the information is more reliable if we get it get it directly from the annual report.
Why would the media website misrepresent the company information you may ask? Well, they may not do it deliberately but they may be forced to do it due to other factors. For example the company may like to include ‘depreciation’ in the expense side of P&L, but the media website may like to include it under a separate header. While this would not impact the overall numbers, it does interrupt the overall sequencing of data.
What to look for in an Annual Report?
The annual report has many sections that contain useful information about the company. One has to be careful while going through the annual report as there is a very thin line between the facts presented by the company and the marketing content that the company wants you to read.
Let us briefly go through the various sections of an annual report and understand what the company is trying to communicate in the AR. For the sake of illustration, I have taken the Annual Report of Amara Raja Batteries Limited, belonging to Financial Year 2013-2014. As you may know Amara Raja Batteries Limited manufactures automobile and industrial batteries. You can download ARBL’s FY2014 AR from here (http://www.amararaja.co.in/annual_reports.asp)
Please remember, the objective of this chapter is to give you a brief orientation on how to read an annual report. Running through each and every page of an AR is not practical; however, I would like to share some insights into how I would personally read through an AR, and also help you understand what kind of information is required and what information we can ignore.
For a better understanding, I would urge you to download the Annual Report of ARBL and go through it simultaneously as we progress through this chapter.
ARBL’s annual report contains the following 9 sections:
- Financial Highlights
- The Management Statement
- Management Discussion & Analysis
- 10 year Financial highlights
- Corporate Information
- Director’s Report
- Report on Corporate governance
- Financial Section, and
- Notice.
Note, no two annual reports are the same; they are all made to suite the company’s requirement keeping in perspective the industry they operate in. However, some of the sections in the annual report are common across annual reports.
The first section in ARBL’s AR is the Financial Highlights. Financial Highlights contains the bird’s eye view on how the financials of the company looks for the year gone by. . The information in this section can be in the form of a table or a graphical display of data. This section of the annual report generally does a multi-year comparison of the operating and business metrics.
Here is the snapshot of the same:
The details that you see in the Financial Highlights section are basically an extract from the company’s financial statement. Along with the extracts, the company can also include a few financial ratios, which are calculated by the company itself. I briefly look through this section to get an overall idea, but I do not like to spend too much time on it. The reason for looking at this section briefly is that, I would anyway calculate these and many other ratios myself and while I do so, I would gain greater clarity on the company and its numbers. Needless to say, over the next few chapters we will understand how to read and understand the financial statements of the company and also how to calculate the financial ratios.
The next two sections i.e the ‘Management Statement’ and ‘Management Discussion & Analysis’ are quite important. I spend time going through these sections. Both these sections gives you a sense on what the management of the company has to say about their business and the industry in general. As an investor or as a potential investor in the company, every word mentioned in these sections is important. In fact some of the details related to the ‘Qualitative aspects’ (as discussed in chapter 2), can be found in these two sections of the AR.
In the ‘Management Statement’ (sometimes called the Chairman’s Message), the investor gets a perspective of how the man sitting right on top is thinking about his business. The content here is usually broad based and gives a sense on how the business is positioned. When I read through this section, I look at how realistic the management is. I am very keen to see if the company’s management has its feet on the ground. I also observe if they are transparent on discussing details on what went right and what went wrong for the business.
One example that I explicitly remember was reading through the chairman’s message of a well established tea manufacturing company. In his message, the chairman was talking about a revenue growth of nearly 10%, however the historical revenue numbers suggested that the company’s revenue was growing at a rate of 4-5%. Clearly in this context, the growth rate of 10% seemed like a celestial move. This also indicated to me that the man on top may not really be in sync with ground reality and hence I decided not to invest in the company. Retrospectively when I look back at my decision not to invest, it was probably the right decision.
Here is the snapshot of Amara Raja Batteries Limited; I have highlighted a small part that I think is interesting. I would encourage you to read through the entire message in the Annual Report.
Moving ahead, the next section is the ‘Management Discussion & Analysis’ or ‘MD&A’. This according to me is perhaps one of the most important sections in the whole of AR. The most standard way for any company to start this section is by talking about the macro trends in the economy. They discuss the overall economic activity of the country and the business sentiment across the corporate world. If the company has high exposure to exports, they even talk about global economic and business sentiment.
ARBL has both exports and domestic business interest; hence they discuss both these angles in their AR. See the snapshot below:
ARBL’s view on the Indian economy:
Following this the companies usually talk about the trends in the industry and what they expect for the year ahead. This is an important section as we can understand what the company perceives as threats and opportunities in the industry. Most importantly I read through this, and also compare it with its peers to understand if the company has any advantage over its peers.
For example, if Amara Raja Batteries limited is a company of interest to me, I would read through this part of the AR and also would read through what Exide Batteries Limited has to say in their AR.
Remember until this point the discussion in the Management Discussion & Analysis is broad based and generic (global economy, domestic economy, and industry trends). However going forward, the company would discuss various aspects related to its business. It talks about how the business had performed across various divisions, how did it fare in comparison to the previous year etc. The company in fact gives out specific numbers in this section.
Here is a snapshot of the same:
Some companies even discuss their guidelines and strategies for the year ahead across the various verticals they operate in. Do have a look at the snapshot below:
After discussing these in ‘Management Discussion & Analysis’ the annual report includes a series of other reports such as – Human Resources report, R&D report, Technology report etc. Each of these reports are important in the context of the industry the company operates in. For example, if I am reading through a manufacturing company annual report, I would be particularly interested in the human resources report to understand if the company has any labor issues. If there are serious signs of labor issues then it could potentially lead to the factory being shut down, which is not good for the company’s shareholders.
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