Business Simulation Games Blog

Context with the Company Board

  

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Information is only useful when contextualized.

The Company Board provides a context for studying financial details. Apple’s fiscal year closed at the end of September, and the resulting Company Board is shown below.

The Company Board (tm) for Apple 2008

At a glance you can see:

• better than 10% Return on Sales
• very high levels of Cash and Short-term investments
• strong debt-to-equity position
• phenomenal cash flow
• Return on Assets is virtually 100% if you take out cash and short term investments.

But you don’t just see the bits of information… you see each of these bits in the context of the others. Which makes the Company Board useful for contextualizing the financial results (i.e. information) of a company.

The next post compares Apple 2007 & 2008 results.