You are a respected city analyst who specialises in advising clients who are interested in purchasing equities in a given industry sector. You are asked to give investment advice on a company to be agreed at an early opportunity with the module leader.

Your company must be:

·                     Discussed and agreed with the module leader by Friday 9^th October 2015

·                     Quoted on a major stock exchange (e.g. LSE, NYSE, SSE, NSE)

·                     A prominent company, for which significant information is publicly available in English (both financial and non-financial information)

·                     Drawn from a mainstream industry where there are readily identifiable peers (competitors) for which you can also gather good financial information

·                     Drawn from an industry where you can gather good industry-wide information and from a country where there is readily available macroeconomic indicator information

Requirement for the Equity Analyst’s Report

You are to produce a company (equity) analysis report. It is expected that you will use the full range of information sources available to you (including DataStream, Osiris, and Bloomberg, where possible) to complete your assignment.

Once you have completed your student tearsheet presentation exercise and received some informal, formative feedback from your module leader and informal feedback from your module colleagues, you must engage in deeper analysis to produce a full equity analyst’s report. The report must be word-processed and the length must not exceed 3,000 words. Your report must contain the following sections:

a)     Analyst’s tearsheet;

b)    Company profile, including a segmental analysis;

c)     Macroeconomic analysis;

d)    Industry analysis;

e)     Competitor analysis, using Porter’s Five Forces model;

f)     Discussion of the company’s business model and corporate strategy;

g)    Analysis of key corporate events and activities (if relevant);

h)     A summary analysis of the company’s financial statements;

i)      A full financial ratio analysis, including trend analysis, comparison with industry ratios, the identification and computation of customised industry ratios;

j)      Company valuations, employing dividend models (where appropriate) and multiples models, with all assumptions justified;

k)     A basic free cash flow model, with an Excel printout of that model to be placed in the appendix, along with a justification of the assumptions made;

l)      A conclusion which summarises the key points made across your report, the outlook for the company, and the investment recommendation, the latter of which compares your valuations with the current market price;

m)   A references section at the end of your report.

Your report is to be pitched at fund managers who require investment advice on buying/selling shares in the company you have selected. You must clearly reference any material you have used at the end of your report and carefully source all data tables, graphs, and material from other parties, giving the date at which the data was collected.

The following criteria will be used in evaluating this assessment:

10%      Presentation and quality of the final report

20%      Depth of analysis of the macroeconomic and industry environment

20%      Quality of analysis of the company, its business model, and its strategy

20%      Competency of financial statement analysis

20%      Quality of equity valuations

10%      Credibility of outlook and investment recommendation

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100% of report mark

All work should be word processed in 12 point font Times New Roman or Arial.

Please use MS Word as your file format.

Please ensure that you provide the following details on the first page of your coursework:

• Student Number
• Module Name and Number
• Word Count
• Name of your case study company

The word limit for this coursework is 3,000 words

• Word count includes everything in the main body of the text (including headings, tables, citations, quotes, lists, etc.).
• The references, bibliography, footnotes (provided footnotes only include references) and appendix material are NOT included in the word count.
• There is no direct penalty for exceeding the word count but the marker WILL stop reading once the word limit has been reached and nothing further will be taken into account in the allocation of marks.