Question

Company's= Home Depot and Lowes

What is the relationship between your companies and their respective employees and investors? How do these relationships affect financial performance?

Are there any issues outstanding for your companies? How do these issues affect the overall financial viability of your companies?

Compare and contrast your two companies using the financial statements for the two firms and the accumulated data.

Justify if you were going to make an investment in one of the two companies, which one would you select? Why?

Answer 1

First four parts:

Part 1:

Employees are the most important resources of a company. In order to achieve the desired objectives the employees of an organization must work honestly and efficiently. The employees on the other hands earn their livelihood from the company in which they work. Thus, the success of an organization to a large extent is dependent on the ability of an organization to make effective use of its human resources, i.e. employees.

The investors on the other hand invest their funds and assets in a company with the objective to earn significant return. The company by making use of the assets and money invested by the investors earn profit. Out of these profits the investors are provided dividend periodically.

Part 2:

The financial performance of an organization affects immensely due to the relationships between the company and its employees and investors respectively. The better the employees will perform the better will be the financial performance of an organization. However, in case of investors since they are not directly involved in the day to day affairs of an organization it is solely up to the management to make proper use of the resources provided by the investors to improve the financial performance of an organization.

Part 3:

The Apple Inc. has been chosen as the company to answer the question. The financial statements of the company and other documents of the company which are available for the public verification does not point out outstanding issues with respect to the employees and investors of the company. However, there are certain outstanding issues in respect to the certain cases of infringement and abuse of trademark and products of the company. In respect of these issue there are certain cases which are outstanding in various courts in the US as well as in other countries.

Part 4:

Certainly, these outstanding issues do influence the financial performance as the reputation of the company is question subsequent to the news of such issues circulate in the market. However, since most of the cases are against the competitors of the company violating the trademark of Apple Inc. and not the opposite hence, the reputation of the company has not been tarnished.