Company:
Walt Disney Co. (DIS—Entertainment)
Overview
Corporate financial managers must have a business-wide perspective to successfully navigate the corporate environment. The skills you develop in this course will support you in your future business career. Your final project for FIN 330 will allow you to showcase your skills with the quantitative and qualitative concepts of corporate finance and leadership that a finance professional must obtain. It will require you to analyze a real-world corporation from a quantitative perspective. You will also investigate the challenges and decisions a manager must face.
Your final project is a corporate valuation report. In this report, you will choose one of the U.S. corporations from the provided Final Project Company List. You will then analyze the historical financials of your chosen corporation using the provided Excel template, which is linked in the What to Submit section. Then, you will estimate the value of your corporation in a brief written report.
Directions
You have been hired as an analyst for a company. The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) has asked you to prepare a corporate valuation report for the upcoming annual Board of Directors meeting. The data, written report, and Excel analysis will provide insights into the company’s historical performance and trends, capital structure, and outlook. Your report will be extremely useful for the effective management of the company.
This milestone requires you to write a draft of the Overview and Financial History sections (Sections I and II) of the Final Project, the corporate valuation report. This milestone requires you to select and focus on a specific corporation of interest from a provided list for the larger final projects.
Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:
Overview: Select a company from the provided list. Then, write a thorough overview of the corporation’s background. Specifically, you must:
Describe the market to which your corporation belongs. Identify the products or services your corporation sells and the share of the market it has.
Describe the customer base of your corporation. What are the top competitors for this customer base? What motivates the customers? What challenges do the corporation face in keeping this customer base?
Describe the supply chain, key resources for corporate operation (such as staff, facilities, technologies, and so forth), and other key inputs used to create the products or services. To what extent does attaining all these resources present a challenge to the company?
Analyze the key market trends and issues within the industry that pose potential risk to the corporation.
Financial History: This section of your report focuses on the financial history and capital structure of your organization. Specifically, you must:
Analyze three years of the corporation’s finances using the provided Excel template. Submit this template along with your written report. You may embed pieces of the Excel template into your written report to show key financial highlights for the following section.
Please note that, for Milestone One, you only need to complete the “Financial History” tab in the spreadsheet. You will enter data in the yellow highlighted cells only.
Summarize the financial highlights you determined from your analysis in the Excel template. Explain the significance of the key ratios for the overall financial health of the corporation.
What to Submit
You will submit two files for Milestone One. Your written portion should be a Microsoft Word document of 3–4 pages in length. In addition, include the Excel Final Project Spreadsheet Template you used to address section II. A. above as a separate file. The written submission should use 12-point Times New Roman font, double spacing, one-inch margins, and APA formatting. Submit both your written response and the completed Excel template when submitting this assignment. Any citations should follow APA guidelines. Your supporting research should be as up to date as possible. Any news stories, press releases, or additional sources must be dated within the last 60 days. Company data should be no more than one year old. Using older data may result in being asked to resubmit your work.
