00:01Hi, I'm Jimmy
00:03In this video, we're going to go through how to analyze an annual report
00:05Now, I’m hoping to keep this process fairly simple so that even if we're beginners in investing or beginners in analyzing companies, we should be able to use this process to help us better understand a potential investment
00:18The goal of this video is for us to better understand what's important to look at when we're reading an annual report and what’s a good order to follow when tackling a new company
00:28If we're analyzing a company for the first time, what is the process to go about that? And hopefully, we can use this information to better understand companies and use that knowledge to make smarter investment decisions
00:40and ideally get us closer to our goal of achieving financial freedom
00:45Okay, now I'm also very proud to announce that this is actually my second sponsored video
00:49We get a lot of offers for sponsored videos now that we're over 100,000 subscribers
00:54The channel gets a decent amount of offers, but some of them I really just don't like
00:59This sponsor for this video is actually the same video sponsor we had from the last time, called Borsa Earnings Calls, and basically it's a way to listen to companies' earnings calls, sort of like you would listen to a podcast
01:11It's free, and it's an easy app to use, but we'll touch more on that in a moment
01:15So for now, let's jump into how to read an annual report
01:18Now, I'm going to use Apple as a tentative example, as sort of..
01:19The template for what we're doing, but you can apply it to any company
01:22This is what Apple's table of contents looks like for the annual report, also known as a 10-K
01:30Now, the very first section I like to go to is the Business section
01:33The Business section is a great way to get a better understanding of the company's background and how the company views their own business because they usually describe what their business is all about in fairly plain language
01:45So, the company can also break out what they sell; they might segment them by product type or product category
01:52They could also break them up by region, maybe by country or continent, or something along those lines, but they usually..
02:00give you a good understanding of what the company does and how to segment it
02:04The good part is this section generally isn't all that long
02:08Apple, as an example, breaks their business sections into just four pages, and they break out their revenue according to the products that they sell
02:14So it's a nice, clean way of doing it
02:21Then, after we're done with this one section, we get to make a decision: is this a company that we're interested in investing in? We get to ask that question
02:27If it's not, perhaps we read about it, and it doesn't seem like a business that has a great future, then we can simply not read any further
02:34We could eliminate the company, which is a great option to have since we don't have to invest in every company
02:40An investment opportunity that we come across, we read about as many companies as possible until you only find the handful of companies, a few dozen companies, whatever it ends up being, that you really love
02:51But you get that by going through many different companies
02:55Okay, now the next section we're going to want to read in our annual report is Management's Discussion and Analysis, sometimes you might hear this called MDA for short
03:03And basically, what this does is this is the management's opportunity to get more numbers behind what they do
03:12The Business section really describes what the business is trying to do, and the MDA section is trying to explain how they're actually doing; what's their performance actually been like
03:21Their plan, things along those lines, maybe they even talk about some of their competitors
03:26So, if you've seen some of our videos on this channel where we analyze a different company, well, oftentimes it's this section of the annual report that allows us to create the charts where we're breaking out the business by segments or talking about the revenue within different business lines of different regions
03:42This is where a lot of that information comes from
03:46Now, this is also where I like to listen to the earnings call
03:49I find that earnings calls and the Management Discussion and Analysis section often cover a lot of the same information
03:58So, this is a natural segue into the Borsa earnings call app, by the way, if you're curious
04:02I've got a link for the app in the description below for both Android and Apple devices, so if you want to go download it, just click over there
04:10Like I said, it's free, but one of the things I like about this app is that you can create watchlists, see future earnings calls, and listen to any investor presentation pretty much that they're putting out on the internet
04:23This app gets a lot of them, so I think it's a really great app, and it's free to use and easy
04:28Like I said, it's very simple, sort of like listening to a podcast
04:31One of the advantages of listening to the call versus just reading the Management Discussion and Analysis is that you get to hear their tone, you get to hear the company's tone, and you get to hear questions
04:42That analysts ask that the company maybe wasn't ready for, so you get to hear their reactions to all of that
04:49I think that listening to an earnings call, coupled with reading the Management Discussion and Analysis, can be a great combo for truly understanding the business
05:01Okay, now shifting back to, frankly, it's now or another decision point in our analysis
05:06Do we continue to like the company? If we do, we move on to the next step; if not, we eliminate it again
05:14We're always looking for reasons to eliminate companies because, if you eliminate all the bad ones, in theory you're left with only the good ones
05:20So, assuming we like the company, we now move over to looking at some of the numbers
05:24This part of the investment analysis..
05:28It is a bit tricky, and it can't be a little more skilled
05:30Generally, the more we understand about how companies are supposed to report earnings, the more effectively we can analyze financial statements
05:38However, there are some tricks that we can use, even for beginning investors who know very little about accounting
05:44There is a process you can follow to make understanding the business simpler
05:48So, first, let's pull down the income statement
05:52This is Apple's income statement for the end of 2019
05:53Personally, what I like to do is convert some of these numbers into percentages; they call this common size analysis
06:03Here's what I mean: we start with their revenue, and Apple was kind enough to break down their revenue
06:09Into the products that they're selling, so they have products and they have services
06:13If we were to divide the product revenue by total revenue, we end up with about 82% for 2019
06:21So now we know that product sales accounted for about 82 percent of revenue in 2019
06:26Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, we don't really know right now; it's just a reference point
06:32So what if we did the same thing for 2018 and 2017? Now we can see that product sales have actually declined as a percentage of total revenue from year to year
06:41Now, that's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing
06:45Management might very well have a good plan as to why that's happening, but it is an interesting thing to note, and it's really only..
06:52Really, by doing this type of analysis, now, what if we apply the same to Apple's gross profit margins? Well, gross profit margins are about 38 percent when compared to total revenue for the year, and we can see, when we look at the other years, that it's been fairly consistent
07:08Once again, we can repeat this process for net income
07:11In Apple's case, we see good consistency, at least over these past three years
07:16Now, if we wanted to go a bit more in-depth, it could make sense to go back and look at some older annual reports and create these very same charts that you might see in some of the videos we've done on this channel, where we analyze the company
07:21This is how you can do that
07:26We can look at what the total..
07:31Percentage and what is the actual trend
07:34Okay, now we're going to shift over to the balance sheet, and I'm actually going to break the balance sheet into different sections because the balance sheet is really long and it's tough to fit on the screen
07:44So, the first section of the balance sheet is assets, and what we're looking at here is the total assets, which is right down here
07:52Then, once again, we can convert any of these numbers into a percentage of total assets
07:56We can then compare these results to calculations from previous years, or perhaps we would feel more comfortable comparing them to a competitor
08:08We could do the same thing for everything we looked at in the income statement
08:13The point is, by coming up with percentages, well, it doesn't really matter how large the company is
08:18That's why they call it common size analysis, because by expressing everything as percentages, we can see more clearly how this company is doing compared to another company or how segments perform from year to year
08:29So, I think it makes sense to do both: look at how the company performs itself and find a close competitor to compare it to
08:35Okay, simple enough
08:41Now, we're actually going to lock in this total assets number down here at the bottom, and then we're going to switch this to the liabilities section of the balance sheet
08:47Once again, the same math applies; we can take any one of these line items that we..
08:52Decide, we can compare it to total assets, and just like that, we might be able to look at how much they owe versus how many assets they have
09:01Now, I also want to point out that we can mix and match how we compare numbers
09:05In this case, I'm using total assets, and that's a very good place to start, but you might also hear people compare, let's say, current liabilities to current assets
09:16Well, they call this the current ratio; it's a very good number to use
09:18So, you can mix and match how you're comparing it, as long as you want to do the same thing throughout time
09:25If you're comparing it over time or against competitors, if you're doing that using the same data points, you can also compare it to total revenue or even profit
09:33So, there are lots of options
09:36Ways to analyze this, I personally like to start with the income statement, then move to the balance sheet—starting with total assets and breaking things down from there
09:44Then, I would do the same for the equity portion of the balance sheet, comparing it to total assets
09:48Next, we shift over to the cash flow statement
09:53For the cash flow statement, I like to start with total revenue as the baseline number, break down the percentages, and if you ever download all this data into Excel, it becomes really easy to compare numbers using drag-and-drop formulas
10:06For the cash flow statement, I generally like to start with total revenue when coming up with some comparison points, so in Apple's case, we take..
10:15The total net sales, and then we compare that to, let's say, the operations portion of the cash flow statement
10:23So now, we can run the cash flow numbers against total sales
10:27Personally, common size analysis is a fantastic thing to do, but sometimes, on the cash flow statement, I also like to look at the numbers—sort of the hard numbers—to see how they actually look and to see if that tells us anything interesting
10:42For example, cash flow from operations—well, this is one of the key numbers
10:46This is how much cash the business generated from ordinary operations, and generally, we want this number to move higher over time
10:55Then, when we switch over to the investing and financing sections, these are on the cash flow statement as well; they're..
11:00Below the cash flow from operations section, we can see some interesting things
11:05We can note that Apple has been buying back shares on a fairly regular basis
11:09We can also see that they've paid out some dividends; those dividends have increased each year
11:14Then we can also see that they've issued some shares; that's why this number has gone up, although this number is fairly low relative to the rest of their numbers
11:22So, I'm guessing, because this number is so low, this is probably somehow tied to stock options that were exercised by employees, management, or the board of directors, whoever it was
11:32But if we're not sure and want to dive deeper into any one section of the analysis or the financial..
11:39Statements, well, oftentimes in the footnotes of the financial statements, the footnotes will explain what happened or what accounting methodology they're using
11:50So even if we're brand new to investing, reading the footnotes about a section that perhaps looks unusually large or something along those lines can be a smart thing to do because sometimes they'll explain it for us, and if nothing else, it'll certainly make it easier to Google what a particular line item is supposed to do
12:08Now, at this point in time, we should have a good idea, a good understanding of what the business does, what their potential is, and whether or not we think that they're a fundamentally sound business
12:18So again, we get to make..
12:20Another decision, because after this, there are only a few other statements that could be interesting to look at
12:28We've already looked through the annual report, so there's only a few other things
12:30The earnings calls are a good place to start
12:34We'd want to try to come up with a fair value of whatever we think that company is because once we know, okay, we like the company, the next question is where do we buy it? We'd like to probably look at some of their press releases, perhaps some news
12:46Now, I actually did a video, another video similar to this one, where I go beyond just the 10-K or the annual report, and I go through the entire research process
12:58So, if you're curious, perhaps that could be a good next video for you to watch
13:00I got a..
13:02Link right here
13:04I've got a link in the description below, and don't forget to download the free Bursa earnings call app
13:06I’ve got links in the description below, and thank you so much for sticking with me all the way to the end of the video
13:10I really appreciate it
13:13Thanks, and I'll see you in the next video.