The Importance Of Financial Solvency

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Every one knows that there is a risk when it comes to investing in a business. There is the risk that all the money you have poured into a business, which you hope will grow and inflate in value over time, will depreciate, or even worse vanish, in the span of just a couple hours. Even with such risks however certain people still make investing their career path; but how? How do these people make their living off of something that is so uncertain? The trick is through the financial statements that each publicly traded company must issue. With financial statements such as the annual and quarterly report investors are able to look at the health of the company and can decide if it will prosper in the future or fail. Looking at the annual reports …show more content…

Solvency is a firm 's ability to both meet its interest payments when they come due and to pay the balances of debts come their maturity. Solvency measures a firms capability in surviving in the long run. While solvency ratios measured a firms capability in the short run through numbers such as current assets and current liabilities, solvency takes a look at the bigger picture and at numbers such as total assets and total liabilities. The first ratio to measure a firms solvency is the debt to assets ratio. The debt to assets ratio measures exactly how much of a firms total assets are financed or provided through debt. How this ties into solvency is that a firm that is highly leveraged has less wiggle room and less flexibility financially. So if times get tough for the firm, they are more likely to go under due to their large amount of liabilities. For Cisco the debt to assets ratio is 0.461:1, while for Logitech it is 0.468:1. These two values are so close for the two firms that is undoubtedly shows and industry average, and while the .46 range means that a majority of both companies are financed through equity 46% is most certainly a significant portion of the company 's

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