What Visual Finance highlights for Schneider Electric

When you look at Schneider Electric's 2010 financial statements (2011 not being publicly available yet) in the Visual Finance app, you can see at once that:

• it's a profitable company, with something under 10% Return On Sales (turning on Ratios would give you the actual figure immediately);
• long-term debt is under control

but two anomalies also stand out:

• It looks like customers are taking an enormously long time to pay - Days Sales Outstanding is well over 90 Days. This is a situation worth checking into in the Notes to the Financial Statements in the Annual Report.
• The largest Fixed Assets item, when you click on it or hover over it, turns out to be Goodwill. In other words, the company has been on a major buying binge and, without racking up excessive debt, has paid well over book value for one or more acquisitions - which would have been done to meet the strategic needs of the company.

So Schneider Electric looks like a profitable company, able to generate cash for its major acquisitions, despite some possible glitch in its Receivables process. It is expanding through acquisitions - you'd have to down-arrow to previous years to see how it has changed from before the acquisitions. Whatever its strategic plan is, the company appears it is fulfilling it.

It will be interesting to see how the results for 2011 compare when they are released.

(Andromeda Training is proud to have been providing business acumen training for Schneider Electric's leadership development and new hire engineers for many years in the US and Mexico. You can find more info Visual Finance on our website, the app itself is available here