Forecasting financial performance for quarries

Abstract

The paper highlights the importance of successful financial performance for companies, and provides for a brief review of foreign expert opinions on the most important factors that influence the financial performance of enterprises. Linear and quadratic discriminate analyses and a logistic regression analysis were applied to a sample file of 233 annual data from 3 countries (Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Ukraine) for a period of 2008-2012 concerning quarries extracting building materials. These methods provided for distributing the sample file quarries into two classes of profitable and loss-making enterprises. Their financial performance had been known, which enabled to assess the classification accuracy of individual method applications. The average classification accuracy was about 86% and there were no significant differences in the specific method applications. The linear discriminate analysis calculations are the simplest ones in comparison with two other applied methods. The linear discriminate analysis also made possible to identify the most influential discriminators that contributed to the classification into the specific groups. In case of our investigation, prices per production unit, direct variable costs, and ratio of fixed costs to total costs were the most important factors of influence. The factors, if analysed, can provide for prediction of financial performance of quarries in future.