Читать книгу Corporate Finance For Dummies - Michael Taillard - Страница 124

By itself, the information you find in the income statement is great for tracking expenses and revenues, corporate revenue management, and dividend policy. But you can find out even more by comparing the same company’s income statements over a series of years. In fact, by watching for trends in a company’s income statements, you can identify successes or problems with specific operations that generate costs relative to the amount that the operations contribute to generating revenues. And, of course, you can compare the income statement of one company to the income statements of other companies in the same industry to determine how competitive that company is within the industry as well as how it should position itself regarding price and volume of output.

When used in conjunction with other financial statements, the income statement contributes to a number of metrics that measure how effectively a company’s management manages its assets and how well the company yields returns on those assets. Investors can use these metrics to determine whether the company is generating income and wealth on their share of the ownership in the company and whether the company is holding excessive levels of debt that could endanger the value of their ownership sometime in the future. I discuss these different metrics in Chapters 7 and 8.