Analysing companies and forecasting earnings is a complex task.

In this course, student teams will follow the tasks usually performed by an equity analyst preparing a projection for a company's future earnings:

• Strategic analysis: Industry position, corporate/business strategies, business model(s), value generation and value drivers
• Financial analysis: a detailed analysis of the companies recent full year and quarterly reports, identification of value drivers using correlation

This type of analysis requires intimate knowledge not only of the company itself, but also the industry and the market(s) the company operates in as well as accounting knowledge.

The final result of each team will be a report and a presentation of the company's strategic and financial position that will provide the foundation for the following Business Forecasting Project course.

The working language is English.

Students will not only sharpen their analytical skills, but also gain team work experience, enhance their time management and presentation style, learn about efficient and effective spreadsheet modeling and improve their English language skills (vocabulary, written and oral communication).

Team work, written reports, designing a model for analysis and forecasting in Excel, presentations, discussions, coaching sessions and practitioner feedback will provide a rich and immersive learning environment.

Grading is based on group-specific grades for the different stages of the project and individual adjustments based on regular peer reviews.

A detailed grading scheme will be presented at the kickoff meeting and published on Learn@WU.

required: Grundkurs SBWL

recommended: Financial Management, AMC III

Apart from financial analysis knowhow your performance and level of effort will depend on your Word, Excel and Powerpoint skills. For those who have not used these tools intensively we recommend to get (re)acquainted with these programs before the start of the course. We'll provide basic templates for Word and Powerpoint, but not for Excel. VBA programming is not required, but may be helpful.

Specifically, we recommend a look at the following issues:

Microsoft Word: consistent formatting of documents

Microsoft Excel: separation of data and models, absolute and relative cell references, standardizing workbook formats, customized cell formats, conditional formatting, linking worksheets, resolving circular references