Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) is a Fortune 500 company, the nation’s largest retail bookseller and the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products. Barnes & Noble provides customers easy and convenient access to books, magazines, newspapers and other content across its multi-channel distribution platform. Barnes & Noble, Inc. is a publicly traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “BKS.” After a series of mergers and bankruptcies in the American bookstore industry since the 1990s, Barnes & Noble stands as United States ' last remaining national bookstore chain. Previously, Barnes and Noble operated the chain of small B. Dalton Book stores in malls until they announced the …show more content…
A strong balance sheet gives an investor an idea of how financially stable the company really is. Many professionals consider the top line, or cash, the most important item on a company’s balance sheet. The big three categories on any balance sheet are “assets, liabilities, and shareholder equity.” Evaluating Barnes & Noble’s assets for the time 2014 at $3,537,449, 2013 at $3,732,536 and 2012 at $3,774,699, the company’s performance summarizes that it is remaining stable. These numbers reflect a steady rate over the three year period. Like assets, liabilities are current or noncurrent. Current liabilities are obligations due within a year. Key investors look for companies with fewer liabilities than assets. Analyzing this type of important information, informs a potential investor that if the company owes more money than they are bringing in that this company is in financial trouble. Assessing the liabilities of the balance sheet, for the same time period, it is also consistent with the assets. The cash flow demonstrates a stable performance in the company’s assets and would be determined that the liabilities of this company are also stable. Equity is equal to assets minus liabilities, and it represents how much the company’s shareholders actually have a claim to. Investors customarily observe closely
Net working capital represents organization’s operating liquidity. In order to compute the net working capital, total current assets are divided from total current liabilities. When there is sufficient excess of current assets over current liabilities, an organization might be considered sufficiently liquid. Another ratio that helps in assessing the operating liquidity of as company is a current ratio. The ratio is calculated by dividing the total current assets over total current liabilities. When the current ratio is high, the organization has enough of current assets to pay for the liabilities. Yet, another mean of calculating the organization’s debt-paying ability is the debt ratio. To calculate the ratio, total liabilities are divided by total assets. The computation gives information on what proportion of organization’s assets is financed by a debt, and what is the entity’s ability to pay for current and long term liabilities. Lower debt ratio is better, because the low liabilities require low debt payments. To be able to lend money, an organization’s current ratio has to fall above a certain level, also the debt ratio cannot rise above a certain threshold. Otherwise, the entity will not be able to lend money or will have to pay high penalties. The following steps can be undertaken by a company to keep the debt ratio within normal
U.S. GAAP and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), formerly known as iGAAP, are two accounting standards used in today’s world of financial reporting. These standards have differences as well as similarities in reporting requirements. Organizations in the United States are required to follow GAAP principles in preparing financial statements and other financial reports. Whereas, organizations outside of the United States may follow IFRS. Balance sheet reporting and formatting is an area in which GAAP and IFRS may differ, yet be similar in many respects. The balance sheet is a financial statement of what a company owns and what it owes at a given date and time (Spiceland, Sepe, & Nelson, 2013). This paper will address differences and similarities in respect to balance sheet reporting and formatting as it relates to fixed assets and liabilities, inventory, and goodwill.
Best Buy has grown steadily and improved its business and customer’s experience in many ways throughout its journey from 1966 until 2011. The company’s main objective is to focus on making the customers visit to the store as pleasant and as informative as possible. The company is on its steady path of revolution and innovation by implementing customer driven and technology powered strategies. When any new business is setup, it faces its preliminary phase challenges and so has Best Buy but now the business is booming in the world of technology. It’s well known to be a one stop shop for all technological needs.
In an interview with James Wetherbe, Richard M. Schulze tells of how at eleven-years-old he became an entrepreneur in St. Paul, Minnesota as a paperboy. This newspaper boy would grow up to be founder of the world’s largest consumer electronics chain store, Best Buy Co. Inc. (Schulze, 2014). As an adult in 1966 Schulze partnered up with Gary Smoliak and opened the company called Sound of Music until 1986 (Bailey, 2015). Schulze bought out Smoliak around 1970 and by 1983 he had changed the name of the company to Best Buy Co., Inc. Four years later Best Buy Co., Inc. secures an entry on the New York Stock Exchange. During the early 1990’s Best Buy Co., Inc., had become the largest consumer electronics store in the United States.
The bookstore chain has been decreasing in profit in the US over the past 20 years. Most of the books retailers are shutting down their operations and only a few are still operating in the country. Barnes and Noble has become the largest bookseller in the book retailers industry (1). The firm has integrated its business philosophy into web presence though eBook marketplace. This business strategy assisted the firm to be able to reach a large scale customers and remain as a strongest competitor in the book retailing market.
“It has licensed existing commercial technology and focused its internal development efforts on proprietary systems necessary to provide the highest level of service to its customers.” (Avention, 2014). The overall mix of applications and technology allows the Barnes and Noble to “support a distributed, scalable and secure ecommerce environment." (Avention, 2014) Hosted in two locations they use Intel-based server technology in a fully robust configuration to power its website. At both of these locations, Barnes and Noble “maintain computers that store its web pages in electronic form and transmit them to requesting users.” (Avention, 2014). Along with this both locations are “configured with excess Internet telecommunications capacity to ensure quick response time and use three separate Internet service providers.” (Avention, 2014) While at one is maintained by a third party vendor host, the other is hosted internally by Barnes and Noble. Chris Troia, the CIO for Barnes & Noble in 2004 “is responsible for the information technology, telecommunication networks and computer systems that support the company, as well as allocating and evaluating the overall technology resources and strategies.” (Avention,
Kodak’s debt ratio has been improving since 2012 when it was considerably above 1. Their 2014 debt ratio is 0.89, which is very close to Hewlett-Packard and Sony. The debt-to-equity ratio of Kodak is the first signal within the ratios that the company is not performing well. Generally, this ratio should be below 1 and for Kodak in 2014 it was 8.83. Their equity is almost non-existent and this is signaling very weak balance sheet strength. Compared to Kodak, Hewlett-Packard and Sony are doing okay, but their ratios are both well above 1. In terms of ability to pay interest, Kodak’s only strong year was 2013. Their ratio has dipped in 2014, showing that they aren’t able to pay their interest or are struggling to pay it. Hewlett-Packard had no interest expense in their latest fiscal year and Sony’s ratio is very strong. In 2012, Kodak’s free cash flow was in the negatives (-$1,176,000). Surprisingly, it reached over two million in 2013, but then dropped to only $33,000 in 2014. Without sufficient cash flow, Kodak is going to have a difficult time increasing their shareholder value. Hewlett-Packard has free cash flow over five million dollars which is huge compared to Kodak. Kodak does not seem to have sufficient cash to handle their business obligations. The cash flow adequacy ratio should be above 1, but Kodak’s are negative. The competitors are around 0.5 for their cash flow adequacy ratio, which
Amazon.com, Inc Company started in 1994 and featured online in 1995. The company has done extremely well in the market achieving remarkable success. Initially, Amazon was known as Cadabra. Inc. however, the name of the company changes when the owners of the company knew that people confused the name for cadaver. Jeff Bezos is credited for founding the company. The company has its base in the United States of America as a multinational e-commerce company. Its headquarters are in Seattle, Washington. It has been rated as the largest online retailing company, in the entire world. It has close to three times the sales revenue that staples, Inc made as a runner up, in January 2010 (Shire, 2008).
Eule, A. (2013). It’s time for Amazon to open its black box. Barron’s, 93(42), 37.
The Harvard Bookstore is a locally owned, independently run bookstore in Cambridge. Against all odds and global market trends, it has survived the rising popularity and demand of eBooks and online bookstores such as Amazon. This is partly due to the unique Espresso Book Machine that it has invested in, which creates perfectly bound paperbacks of any eBook within minutes. In this report, we analyse the business, identifying its strategy and thinking behind its actions through the use of Operations Management theories, with particular focus on the 4V’s.
The company started as an online book seller, which then rapidly expanded into music and movies, and finally into electronics and households.
A strong balance sheet gives an investor an idea of how financially stable the company really is. Many professionals consider the top line, or cash, the most important item on a company’s balance sheet. The big three categories on any balance sheet are “assets, liabilities, and shareholder’s equity.” Evaluating Barnes & Noble’s assets for the time 2014, 2013 and 2012 the company’s performance summarizes that it is remaining stable. These numbers reflect a steady rate over the three year period. Like assets, liabilities are current or noncurrent. Current liabilities are obligations due within a year. Key investors look for companies with fewer liabilities than assets. Analyzing this type of important information, informs a potential investor that if the company owes more money than they are bringing in that this company is in financial trouble. Assessing the liabilities of the balance sheet, for the same time period, it is also consistent with the assets. The cash flow demonstrates a stable performance in the company’s 2014, 2013 and 2012 assets and would be determined that the liabilities of this company are also stable. Equity is equal to assets minus liabilities, and it represents how much the company’s shareholders actually have claim to. Investors customarily observe closely to the retained earnings and paid-in capital under
352). Amazon has disrupted the retail bookstore market and become the dominant bookseller. As e-commerce becomes the norm in daily life, bookstores are unable to compete with the service and selection from Amazon and other online sellers. According to the Census Bureau, bookstore sales in 2017 were down thirty-nine percent from a decade ago (Streitfeld, D., 2017, para. 10). Chain bookstores such as Borders, Family Christian Stores, Hastings Entertainment, and Book World have all declared bankruptcy and closed operations (Streitfeld, D., 2017, para. 2, 4,). As a result of the bookstore closings, publishers now have fewer showrooms to display their products (Esposito, J., 2010, para.
Promotion – Amazon advertises mostly on the internet, some television commercials and primarily relies on “word of mouth” advertising. However, according to Bhasin, “much more is needed in the promotions department from Amazon in India because the traffic of Amazon is being taken over fast by FlipKart -popular website in India. (Bhasin,
The assets are found by adding liabilities and stockholder’s equity together. Liabilities are the company’s debt or obligations that derive from normal business actions. Liabilities usually include the word “payable” such as accounts payable, dividends payable, notes payable or income taxes payable. Stockholder’s equity is the stockholder’s assertion on the assets of a company. Stockholder’s equity can include common stock, preferred stock, or retained earnings. The equation for stockholder’s equity is the total number of assets minus the total number of liabilities. Liabilities, assets and stockholder’s equity are only going to be found on a balance