发布时间 : 星期三 文章营运资金管理对中小企业的盈利能力的影响[外文翻译]更新完毕开始阅读
本科毕业论文（设计）
外 文 翻 译
原文：
Effects Of Working Capital Management On Sme Profitability
The corporate finance literature has traditionally focused on the study of long-term financial decisions. Researchers have particularly offered studies analyzing investments, capital structure, dividends or company valuation, among other topics. But the investment that firms make in short-term assets, and the resources used with maturities of under one year, represent the main share of items on a firm’s balance sheet. In fact, in our sample the current assets of small and medium-sized Spanish firms represent 69.48 percent of their assets, and at the same time their current liabilities represent more than 52.82 percent of their liabilities.
Working capital management is important because of its effects on the firm’s profitability and risk, and consequently its value (Smith, 1980). On the one hand, maintaining high inventory levels reduces the cost of possible interruptions in the production process, or of loss of business due to the scarcity of products, reduces supply costs, and protects against price fluctuations, among other advantages (Blinder and Manccini, 1991). On the other, granting trade credit favors the firm’s sales in various ways. Trade credit can act as an effective price cut (Brennan, Maksimovic and Zechner,1988; Petersen and Rajan, 1997), incentivizes customers to acquire merchandise at times of low demand (Emery, 1987), allows customers to check that the merchandise they receive is as agreed (quantity and quality) and to ensure that the services contracted are carried out (Smith, 1987), and helps firms to strengthen long-term relationships with their customers (Ng, Smith and Smith, 1999). However, firms that invest heavily in inventory and trade credit can suffer reduced profitability. Thus,the greater the investment in current assets, the lower the risk, but also the lower the profitability obtained.
On the other hand, trade credit is a spontaneous source of financing that reduces the amount required to finance the sums tied up in the inventory and customer accounts. But we should bear in mind that financing from suppliers can have a very high implicit cost if early payment discounts are available. In fact the opportunity cost may exceed 20 percent, depending on the discount percentage and the discount period granted (Wilner,2000; Ng, Smith and Smith, 1999). In this respect, previous studies have analyzed the high cost of trade credit, and find that firms finance themselves with seller credit when they do not have other more economic sources of financing available (Petersen and Rajan, 1994 and 1997).
Decisions about how much to invest in the customer and inventory accounts, and how much credit to accept from suppliers, are reflected in the firm’s cash conversion cycle, which represents the average number of days between the date when the firm must start paying its suppliers and the date when it begins to collect payments from its customers. Some previous studies have used this measure to analyze whether shortening the cash conversion cycle has positive or negative effects on the firm’s profitability.Specifically, Shin and Soenen (1998) analyze the relation between the cash conversion cycle and profitability for a sample of firms listed on the US stock exchange during the period 1974-1994. Their results show that reducing the cash conversion cycle to a reasonable extent increases firms’ profitability. More recently, Deloof (2003) analyzes a sample of large Belgian firms during the period 1992-1996. His results confirm that Belgian firms can improve their profitability by reducing the number of days accounts receivable are outstanding and reducing inventories. Moreover, he finds that less profitable firms wait longer to pay their bills.
These previous studies have focused their analysis on larger firms. However, the management of current assets and liabilities is particularly important in the case of small and medium-sized companies. Most of these companies’ assets are in the form of current assets. Also, current liabilities are one of their main sources of external finance in view of their difficulties in obtaining funding in the long-term capital markets(Petersen and Rajan, 1997) and the financing constraints that they face (Whited, 1992; Fazzari and Petersen, 1993). In this respect, Elliehausen and Woken
(1993), Petersen and Rajan (1997) and Danielson and Scott (2000) show that small and medium-sized US firms use vendor financing when they have run out of debt. Thus, efficient working capital management is particularly important for smaller companies (Peel and Wilson,1996).
In this context, the objective of the current work is to provide empirical evidence about the effects of working capital management on profitability for a panel made up of 8,872 SMEs during the period 1996-2002. This work contributes to the literature in two ways. First, no previous such evidence exists for the case of SMEs. We use a sample of Spanish SMEs that operate within the so-called continental model, which is characterized by its less developed capital markets (La Porta, López-de-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny, 1997), and by the fact that most resources are channeled through financial intermediaries (Pampillón, 2000). All this suggests that Spanish SMEs have fewer alternative sources of external finance available, which makes them more dependent on short-term finance in general, and on trade credit in particular. As Demirguc-Kunt and Maksimovic (2002) suggest, firms operating in countries with more developed banking systems grant more trade credit to their customers, and at the same time they receive more finance from their own suppliers. The second contribution is that, unlike the previous studies by Shin and Soenen (1998) and Deloof (2003), in the current work we have conducted tests robust to the possible presence of endogeneity problems. The aim is to ensure that the relationships found in the analysis carried out are due to the effects of the cash conversion cycle on corporate profitability and not vice versa.
Our findings suggest that managers can create value by reducing their firm’s number of days accounts receivable and inventories. Similarly, shortening the cash conversion cycle also improves the firm’s profitability.
We obtained the data used in this study from the AMADEUS database. This database was developed by Bureau van Dijk, and contains financial and economic data on European companies.
The sample comprises small and medium-sized firms from Spain. The selection of SMEs was carried out according to the requirements established by the European
Commission’s recommendation 96/280/CE of 3 April, 1996, on the definition of small and medium-sized firms. Specifically, we selected those firms meeting the following criteria for at least three years: a) have fewer than 250 employees; b) turn over less than �40 million; and c) possess less than �27 million of total assets.
In addition to the application of those selection criteria, we applied a series of filters. Thus, we eliminated the observations of firms with anomalies in their accounts, such as negative values in their assets, current assets, fixed assets, liabilities, current liabilities, capital, depreciation, or interest paid. We removed observations of entry items from the balance sheet and profit and loss account exhibiting signs that were contrary to reasonable expectations. Finally, we eliminated 1 percent of the extreme values presented by several variables. As a result of applying these filters, we ended up with a sample of 38,464 observations.
In order to introduce the effect of the economic cycle on the levels invested in working capital, we obtained information about the annual GDP growth in Spain from Eurostat.
In order to analyze the effects of working capital management on the firm’s profitability, we used the return on assets (ROA) as the dependent variable. We defined this variable as the ratio of earnings before interest and tax to assets.
With regards to the independent variables, we measured working capital management by using the number of days accounts receivable, number of days of inventory and number of days accounts payable. In this respect, number of days accounts receivable (AR) is calculated as 365 × [accounts receivable/sales]. This variable represents the average number of days that the firm takes to collect payments from its customers. The higher the value, the higher its investment in accounts receivable.
We calculated the number of days of inventory (INV) as 365 ×[inventories/purchases]. This variable reflects the average number of days of stock held by the firm. Longer storage times represent a greater investment in inventory for a particular level of operations.
The number of days accounts payable (AP) reflects the average time it takes