Walmart Accounting Analysis

SUBMITTED BY: Amaresh Chandra Panda K H Gupta Mehul Shah SNDS Ramanish Sadhu Upasana Patra

There are large and small businesses all across the country, with many different public and private accounting firms that handle their accounts. Many of these businesses are raking in millions and millions of dollars a year. Wal-Mart is one of them. We will be exploring Wal-Mart and how it came about as a business, along with examining their balance sheets, income statement, and the cash flow statement. We will also be taking a look at what Wal-Mart’s current revenues are over the annual reporting periods, and who handles their accounting process.

Wal-marts marketing strategy is to boast about having the cheapest prices out of their competitor’s and guarantees this, by implementing a price matching policy. Apparently, this has worked out for the best interest of the corporation, and their income statements can prove it. Wal-Mart’s income statement for the past three years reflects a positive growth pattern for every entry of the Income Statement. The Income tax-Current Domestic record is the only entry on this income statement that produces a stabile number. The indication for the income tax number to show a declining trend is probably that the Wal-mart accountants have located many tax loop holes to reduce the actual company income tax load owed.

The purpose of this business report is to gain familiarity with Wal-Mart and to learn about the different aspects that make Wal-Mart a successful company. This report gives an in-depth analysis of the company history, services and products provided, the company philosophy, business methods, organizational structure, and financial and competitive analysis.

For the final project of managing finance Wal-Mart Stores Inc is chosen as the discussion target. Being one of the grocery retail shop leaders in the world, Wal-Mart (WM) operates business with 10,000 retail units in 27 countries with about USD444 million of sales in 2012 (Wal-Mart homepage 2012).

Through the mid-part of the 80’s and into the early 90’s Wal-Mart had still produced annual earnings growth over 20%. It wasn’t until the early part of the century where Wal-Mart had produced earnings growth in the low teens to single digits. With that as supporting material, Wal-Mart has already experienced it’s growth and transition phases of its business cycle and is more in their maturity stage of their business. As of 2010, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world with more than $400 billion in annual revenues across more than 8,000 stores. It would be. It would not be justifiable to utilize the three-stage dividend approach in valuing such a mature company.

A measure of financial performance calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures. Free cash flow (FCF) represents the cash that a company is able to generate after laying out the money required to maintain or expand its asset base. Free cash flow is important because it allows a company to pursue opportunities that enhance shareholder value. Without cash, it's tough to develop new products, make acquisitions, pay dividends and reduce debt.

After analyzing Wal-Mart’s annual report for 2010, attention has been brought to several items that require closer examination. A common “red flag” to questionable accounting has been found within Wal-Mart’s statement of cash flows and income statement. There is an increasing gap between the company’s reported income and the cash flow from operating activities. In the year 2008 reported income and cash flow from operating activities differed by $484 million. However the difference increased a considerable $2,249 and $4,183 billion in the years 2009 and 2010 respectively. This increasing gap is a significant warning sign that the company may be changing accrual estimates.

In analyzing the growth in earnings of the shareholder, a simple but effective tool is the Earnings per share value. For Wal-Mart, this is given as under:

In 1962, Wal-Mart was built sometime by Sam Walton in Roger, Arkansas. Wal-Mart has 5,100 stores and clubs all over the United States and a sum of 8,300 unit's global. The company was able to employ something like over 2 million associates from all over the world and about 2.4 million in the United States. Wal-Marts average annual total income rate was somewhat in excess of 10% for the three years from the fiscal year that is ending 2009 to the fiscal year ending 2011 (Blanchard, 2008). Research shows that they also had what was known as a stock split of 100 %; Wal-Mart was able to see this split 12 times all through the eras of 1973 through 2002. They have received many awards and were categorized 5th in Fortune magazine's "Global Most Well-regarded All-Stars" as the third most appreciated corporation in America (Wal-Mart, 2013)

The final responsibility for the integrity of an SEC registrant’s internal controls lies on the management team. U.S. companies need to refer to a comprehensive framework of internal control when assessing the quality of financial reporting to determine that financial statements are being presented under General Accepted Accounting Principles, GAAP. The widely used framework is referred as COSO, Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission, sponsored by the following organizations American Accounting Association, the American Institute of CPA’s, Financial Executives International, the Institute of Internal Auditors, and the Institute of Management Accountants. COSO’s defines internal control as:

     When you talk about Wal-Mart the first thing that you have to remember is that they are the largest retailer in the world. Wal-Mart employs more people in the United States than any other company and is second only to the federal government in the number of employees that they have on the payroll. These are important facts to consider in that due to their tremendous size, Wal-Mart has an enormous

30. Free cash flow is cash flow that is available for distribution to all of the company’s investors (stockholders and creditors) after paying current expenses (other than interest) and taxes, maintain adequate working capital, and making the investments necessary for growth.

where TV is the terminal value we calculate the present day intrinsic value of the Wal-Mart stock to be $62.15 hence the market value is consider low compared to our forecasted value. This method replicates the basic foundation of the Discount Cash flow Model (DCF), which in our opinion is the preferred method in valuation studies.

Wal-Mart is a company which operates in the service sector, more specifically in the “Discount, Variety Stores/Retail” industry. The company’s superior performance is demonstrated through the fact that it was America’s largest company (in terms of revenue) in 2002, and the reputation of the company is reflected in the opinion of “Fortune” who have identified Wal-Mart as one of the world’s most admired companies. In 2004 Wal-Mart had been hiring 1.4 million employees – making it the largest corporation in the world. Wal-Mart’s share prices have also been stable at time of stock market volatility. There are