Question

Select one (1) U.S. publicly traded company and review its most recent Annual Report.

Use the Income Statement and Balance Sheet to determine the changes in:

assets, liabilities, and equity

total revenue and net income.

Briefly describe the change from the current and prior years in each of these key areas and determine if the changes would be positive or negative from an investor / stockholder's view.

I am stuck because I do not know how to find the income statements and balance sheets of stocks and in doing so how to describe changes year to year.

Answer 1

Select any listed entity(one which is there on stock exchange) such as Apple, Google, Netflix etc

Go to their respective websites and search investor relations tab (here you will find the annual report of the corporations) or you can also google for annual report for the respective corporation.

Download the report for say FY 2017-18. In this report complete financial information i.e, balance sheet and p& L cash flow will be given for two successive years for comparison.

Now in Balance sheet look at the assets, liabilities, and equity for the two succesive years and compare whether they have grown, shrinked or remained same on year on year basis.

Do the same comparison for total revenue and net income by looking at Profit and loss statement.

For eg say...

For XYZ Corporation...

2016-17 2017-18

Revenue ( In Millions) 100 122

so for XYZ corporation revenue has increased in the year 2017-18 with comparison to year 2016-17   by 22%.