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Mini Case Essay

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As mentioned in the introduction of the mini case, Hobby Horse Company, Inc. (HH) experienced a tough year in 2011. HH opened up a number of new stores but experienced a poor Christmas season. Christmas season is the biggest sale period for retail stores. As a result, bad Christmas sales performance played a big part of HH’s loss for year 2011. As we computed the financial ratios for HH, we can see the effects from new stores openings and poor sales performance.
First of all, return on asset (ROA) is a ratio used to measure how efficient a company generates profit using its assets, which is the invested capital. We noticed that HH’s ROA was increasing from 2006 to 2010. However, HH’s ROA for 2011 dropped dramatically from 18.41%(year …show more content…

Given the net sales in 2011 is still higher than 2010, we can assume the problem is most likely with its operating cost management. On the other hand, HH’s assets turnover rate dropping 0.30 from 2010 suggests an inefficiency of generating more sales with its increased assets in 2011.
In addition, as we are comparing the profit margin and operating profit margin, we notice that interest expense, from 2006 to 2010, consumed a relative small portion of sales proceeds comparing to 2011. In 2011, the profit margin for HH is -1.46% and the operating profit margin for HH is -0.74%. Since profit margin includes interest expense in the calculation while operating profit margin does not, we can conclude that HH has about the same amount in interest expense as the amount of operating loss before interest. This finally doubles the amount of company’s loss at the end of the cycle. This big amount of interest expense leads us to study HH’s leverage ratios.
HH’s long term debt/asset ratio was decreasing from 2006 to 2010 and goes up a little bit to 14.82% as shown on the data. However, the total debt ratio were all time above 50% except year 2010. At the end of 2011, HH’s total debt ratio is 57.54% while the long term debt/asset ratio is 14.82%. This tells us that HH has a larger portion in short term debts/ liabilities than long term debts. And as we can see from the consolidated balance sheet,

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