Financial Analysis of the Company Metro AG

Abstract

The goal for this thesis is to analyze the financial situation of Metro A.G from 2007 to 2011 and through these results to evaluate the internal and outer needs of the company, and make some comments and suggestions to the company's performance. In this thesis, the major analytic object is Metro A.G Company. We use financial data, market data and economic data to assess the financial performance of the Metro A.G from 2007 to 2011. Generally, there are three basic financial statements in summarizing information about a company, balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement. These three statements provide main resource to the whole thesis. There are mainly three parts of the thesis. The first part is theoretical description about the financial analysis methods. So in chapter two, besides some briefly introduction about three statements Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement, it is mainly to introduce three methods of financial analysis that will be used in the calculation of the financial data, which are Common-size analysis, Financial ratio analysis and Pyramidal decompositions. The second part of the thesis is the introduction of the company, which is in the chapter three. It is mainly on the characteristics of the company. The main parts include the history, the structure, the segmentation and the main market competitors of the company Metro A.G. The third part is the most important part in the thesis. We use common-size analysis methods which are introduced in Chapter two to analyze the general financial situation of the Metro AG in chapter three. Here we concentrate on the financial ratio analysis method to have a deeper study on every aspect of the items in financial statements and its effects to between two items by influence quantification in chapter four. Through these ratios and comparisons between competitor companies, we will get some conclusion and comments in chapter five; through it we can have more precise prediction of the company's performance in the future.