Posted: October 20th, 2022

Individual Final Report on Corporate Finance

Individual Final Report on Corporate Finance
Due date: Oct 30, 2022
Please submit your report into Moodle under “Individual writeup”
Purposes
l To apply corporate finance theories & best practices to company management
l To help analyze, diagnose and improve a company’s financial decisions so that firm
value can be increased
Topic 1
You are required to prepare an individual report on the financial decisions or management
of a company and identify areas of potential improvement. Choosing your own company
or employer for analysis is highly encouraged. You are expected to apply basic corporate
finance theories and/or good industry practices that you have learned from this course into
the evaluation of select major financial decisions.
You are suggested to include, but are not limited to, the following aspects:
(1) A very brief introduction to your company’s history, major business, industry
competition (please keep this part short; it is not the focus)
(2) You may discuss the ownership structure and any potential issues and improvement in
firm control (optional)
(3) Analyze key financial decisions (e.g., sources and costs of financing, whether the
company calculates the weighted average cost of capital and how it is determined, types
of investment decisions – property, plant, and equipment investment, M&As, R&Ds,
commonly used investment evaluation tools and the procedure of capital budgeting, how
to select the discount rate for an investment project, whether different business
departments (if any) use the same project discount rate, whether and how the company
pays out profits and the considerations in making such decisions; cash holding policy)
and/or performance. Illustrating your points with numbers or examples is encouraged.
(4) You do not have to cover all the above aspects if you can focus on one or two key past
financial decisions made by the company and can analyze them with some depths;
discuss the potential improvement if the company or you were given a chance to redo
them.
(5) Your report should be logically sound and professionally presented (i.e., clearly written,
well structured, convincingly argued, and accurately referenced). The report should be
of at least 1,500 words. Please use Times New Roman font size 12, and allow for
appropriate line spacing.
Topic 2
Apply the finance theory and best finance practices you have learnt from the course to
critically analyze a real company (preferably a high-profile case other than Evergrande) for
its failures in financial management. Requiring at least 1,500 words, please note that the
individual report must be your own work and references are needed where appropriate.
Please note that your report may be scanned by the turn-it-in software for plagiarism,
so do NOT directly copy from public sources and reference should be appropriately
included.