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Case of Unidentified Industries

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HBS - The Case of the Unidentified Industries -2006

With The Case of Unidentified Industries, William E. Fruhan Jr. wants us to visualize the balance sheets belonging to fourteen unknown companies and connect them with the suitable industries.
In order to determine which balance sheets belong to which industry, we studied several companies in those industries. Using a number of different sources such as Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Wikipedia and Investopedia, we were able to the link the unidentified firms balance sheets with their associated industries.

In order to give structure to our analysis, we will have two main parts. In part one we will analyze the Service oriented companies and in the second part we will turn towards the …show more content…

This situation explains why some big bookstores are going out of business when confronted with online companies like Amazon.
So the company B could be in the same situation as Borders bookstore (BGPIQ.PK) is in right now.

The third company is company C, an online direct factory to customer PC vendor.
The high accounts receivable (24%) explains that half of the sales are B-to-B (Business-to-Business). In addition, the note in the case adds that “most manufacturing [is] outsourced”. Which explains why PP&E and inventories are so low and why the inventory turnover is so high.

The pharmaceutical manufacturer was identified as being company D.
The very high amount in other assets could be pinpointed to patents on drugs. Furthermore, the profit margin (15.8%) of this company is very close to the ones that pharmaceutical companies, like Novartis (ADR), would get.
And company D has a high percentage of common stocks, which could be linked to its big market capitalization, characteristic of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The company F could be a computer software developer.
The balance sheet shows a very low level of inventory and PP&E (servers, computers), which concurs with the way of doing business of a software company. Furthermore, like companies like Microsoft (MSFT) it has a high percentage in other assets. Usually a sign of several patents characterizing this type of business (e.g. user interface patents, design patents, function

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