Financial Accounting - European Business Programme
             Consider the financial statements of a company and carry out a financial analysis of the company and an appraisal of its share price.
             Our class presentation was on Hugo Boss AG, but due to difficulties involved in the interpretation of AG accounts, I have analysed the Group accounts of Peacock plc. This was mainly due to the high dependence on tax within the German accounts and the varying ways of displaying consequently the same data, which made analysis difficult. I obtained the accounts from the FT Company account index in both electronic and hardback copy.
             Peacocks is a value for money retailer of clothing, footwear and homeware. The total amount of stores they have in the UK is now 345.
             1. Stocks reduced whilst continuing Retail/Wholesale expansion
             2. 34 new Peacocks stores opened giving 345 at year-end
             3. Woolworth's contract extended to 2005
             4. New concept Peacocks store to be rolled out in current year
             At the very top of the Consolidated Cash Flow statement there is a line titled Net Cash Inflow from Operating Activities (2001- £16,1642002- £26,603)- figures presented in thousands. It is much bigger than the profit before tax figure in the Consolidated Profit and Loss Account, which is good: It should be. It should also be bigger than Capital Expenditure (2001- £18,1082002- £16,222), which you can find a little further down, and is comfortably bigger than the dividend payments, which are about two-thirds of the way down. This shoes a healthy Cash Flow situation for Peacocks and allows us to deduct that Peacocks has enough cash to cover its annual running costs and if it has enough spare to cover the cost of capital investment.
             We need to get an idea of how soundly financed Peacocks is. In other words, how much debt does it have? Or does it have surplus cash? We can work this out from the Balance Sheet, but we need to combine a num...