I’ve got a nifty new product proposal that can't help but make money, and top management turns thumbs down.
No matter how we price this new item, we expect to make $390,000 on it pretax.
That would contribute over 15 cents per share to our earnings after taxes, which is more than the 10 cent earnings -per-share increase in 2015 that president mode such big thing about in the shareholders' annual report.
It just doesn't make sense for the president to be touting e.p.s. while his subordinates are rejecting profitable project like this one.
The frustrated speaker was Sarah McNeil, product development manager of the consumer Products Division of Enager Industries, Inc.
Enager was a relatively young company, which had grown rapidly to its 2015 sales level of over $222 million. (See Exhibits 1 and 2 for financial data for 2014 and 2015)
Enager had three divisions-Consumer Products, Industrial Products, and Professional Services-each of which accounted for about one-third of Enager's total sales. Consumer Products, the oldest of the three divisions, designed, manufactured, and marketed a line of house ware items, primarily for use in the kitchen.
The Industrial Products Division built one-of-a-kind machine tools to customer specifications (i.e., it was a large "job shop”), with job taking several months to compete.
The Professional Services Division, the newest of the three, had been added to Enager by acquiring a large firm that provided land planning, landscape architecture, structural architecture, and consulting engineering services.
This division has grown rapidly, in part because of its capability to perform "environmental impact" studies, as required by law on many new land development projects.
Because of the differing nature of their activities, each division was treated as an essentially independent company.
There were only a few corporate-level managers and staff people, whose job was to coordinate the activities of the three divisions.
One aspect of this coordination was that all new project proposals requiring investment in excess of $1,500,000 had to be reviewed by the chief financial officer, Henry Hubbard it was Hubbard.
It was Hubbard who had recently rejected McNeil's new product proposal, the essentials of which are shown in Exhibit 3.
Performance Evaluation
Prior to 2014, each division had been treated as a profit center, with annual division profit budgets negotiated between the president and the respective division general managers
At the urging of Henry Hubbard, Enager's president, Carl Randall, had decided to begin treating each division as an investment center, so as to be able to relate each division's profit to the assets the division used to generate its profits.
Starting in 2014, each division was measured as based on its return on assets, which was defined to be the division's net income divided by its total assets.
Net income for a division was calculated by taking the division's "direct income before taxes," then subtracting the division's share of corporate administrative expenses (allocated the basis of divisional revenues) and its share of income tax expense (the tax rate applied to the division's "direct income before taxes" after subtraction of the allocated corporate administrative expenses).
Although Hubbard realized there were other ways to define a division's income, he and the president preferred this method since "it made the sum of the (divisional) parts equal to the (corporate) whole".
Similarly, Enager's total assets were subdivided among three divisions. Since each division operated in physically separate facilities, it was easy to attribute most assets, including receivables, to specific divisions.
The corporate -office assets, including the centrally controlled cash account, were allocated the divisions on the basis of divisional revenues.
All fixed assets were recorded at their balance sheet values-that is, original cost less accumulated straight-line depreciation.
Thus, the sum of the divisional assets was equal to the amount shown on the corporate balance sheet ($ 226,257 as of December 31, 2015).
In 1991, Enager had as its return on year-end assets (net income divided by total assets) a rate of 5.2 percent.
According to Hubbard, this corresponded to a "gross return" of 9.3 percent, he defined gross return as equal to earnings before interest and taxes ("EBIT") divided by assets.
Hubbard felt that a company like Enager should have a gross (EBM) return on assets of at least 12 percent, especially given the interest rates the corporation had to pay on its recent borrowing.
He, therefore, instructed each division manager that the division was to try to earn a gross return of 12 percent in 2014 and 2015. In order to help pull the return up to this level, Hubbard decided that new investment proposals would have to show a return of at least 15 percent in order to be