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Inter-firm Comparisons

Let's take a look now at some of what we have talked about so far but in a different way. Here are the return on assets (ROA) and net profit margin values for several companies in the same (retailing) industry. What can we say about these results?

Textbooks might lead us to expect that the ROA and Profit Margins for each company in an industry ought to be the same as each other - we don't see that here do we?

To try to isolate some patterns, though, we should classify this table even more than it has been already. What we mean is, look at the food retailers as a sub-group then look at the other major classifications and see if that helps to sort out what we are looking at.

Here's the above table reorganised ... does it help?

Well, our sample of businesses in each sub-group is too small, apart from those that specialise in retailing food, where we have a sample size of five. There we can see that our average (arithmetic mean) gives a reasonable view of the group.

We can see that the sub-group for Marks and Spencer and Next does not give us such useful results, because there are only two businesses in the sample and the results for each business are significantly different from the other business.

The overall average for entire sector is also useful for us as it gives us a benchmark against which to assess all of the businesses within it. We can use this kind of analysis with all of the ratios we calculate and that will give us an excellent insight into individual businesses as well as the industries and the sectors for which we have data.

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