CASE 1
Finacial Analysis and Forecasting
Garden State Container Corporation
Garden State Container Corporation manufactures boxes and other containers primarily for farm products. More than 85 percent of the company's sales come from the northeastern part of the United States, especially Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Maryland, although the company's patented egg cartons are distributed throughout the United States. Jim Jackson, the founder and president, recntly received a call from Martha Menendez, vice president of Atlantic First National Bank. Menendez told him that a negative report had been generated by the bank's computerized analysis system; the report showed that Garden State's financial position was bad and getting worse.
The bank requires quarterly financial statements from each of its major loan costomers. Information from these statements is fed into the computer, which then calculates key ratios for each customer and charts trends in these ratios. The system also compares the statistics for each against any protective covenants in the loan agreements. If any ratio in significantly worse than the industry average, reflects a marked adverse trend, or fails to meet contractual requirements, the computer highlights the deficiency.
The latest report on Garden State revealed a number of adverse trends and several potentially serious problems (see Tables 1 though 6 for Garden State's historical financial statements). Particalarly disturbing were thd 2006 current, quick, and debt rations, all of which failed to meet the contractual limits of 2.0, 1.0, and 55 percent,respectively. Technically, the bank had a legal right to call all the loans it had extended to Garden State for immediate repayment and, if the loans were not repaid within ten days, to force the company into bankruptcy.
Martha hoped to avoid calling the loans if at all possible, as she knew this would back Garden State into a corner from which it might not be able to emerge. Still, her own bank's examiners had recently become highly sensitive to the issue of problem loans, because the recent spate of bank failures had forced regulators to become more strict in their examination of bank loan portfolios and to demand earlier identification of potential repayment problems.
One meausre fo the quality of a loan is the Altman Z score, which for Garden State was 3.04 for 2006 slightly below the 3.20 minimum that Martha's bank uses to differentiate strong firms with little likelihood of bankruptcy in the next two years form those deemed likely to go into default. This will put the bank under increased pressure to reclassify Garden State's loans as "problem loans," to set up a reserve to cover potential losses, and to take whatever steps are necessary to reduce the bank's exposure. Setting up the loss reserve would have a negative effect on the bank's profits and reflect badly on Martha's performance.
To keep Garden State's loan from being reclassified as a "problem loan," the Senior Loan Committee will require strong and convincing evidence that the company's present difficulties are only temporary. Therefore, it must be shown that appropriate actions to overcome the problems have been taken and that the chances of reversing the adverse trends are realistically good. Martha now has the task of collecting the necessary information, evaluating its implications, and preparing a recommendation for action.
The recession that plagued the U.S. economy in the early 2000s caused severe, though hopefully temporary, problems for companies like Garden State. One top fo this, disastrous droughts for two straight summers had devastated vegetable crops in the area, leading to a drastic curtailment of demand for produce shipping containers. In light of the softening demand, Garden State had aggressively reduced prices in 2005 and 2006 to stimulate sales. Higher sales, the company believed, would allow it to realize greater economies of scale in production and to ride the learning, or experience, curve down to a lower cost posittion. Garden State's management had full confidence that normal weather and national economic policies would revive the ailing economy and that the downturn in demand would be only a short-term problem. Consequently, production continued unabated, and inventories increased sharply.
In a further effort to reduce inventory, Garden State relaxed its credit standards in early 2005 and improved its already favorable credit terms. As a result, sales growth did remain high by industry standards through the third quarter of 2006, but not high enough to keep inventories from continuing to rise. Further, the credit policy changes had caused accounts receivable to increase dramatically by late 2006.
To finance its rising inventories and receivables, Garden State turned to the bank for a long-term loan in 2005 and also increased its short-term credit lines in both 2005 and 2006. However, this expanded credit was insufficient to cover the asset expansion, so the company began to delay payments of its accounts payable until the second late notice had been received. Management realized that this was not a particularly wise decision for the long run, but they did not think it would be necessary to follow the policy for very long-the 2006 summer vegetable crop looked like a record breaker, and it was unlikely that a severe drough would pull out of the weak growht scenario in late 2006. Thus, the company was optimistic that its stable and profitable markets of the past would soon reappear.
After Martha's telephone call, and the subsequent receipt of copy of the bank's financial analysis of Garden State, Jim began to realize just how precarious his company's financial position had become. As he started to reflect on what could be done to correct the problems, it suddenly to reflect on what cold be done to correct the problems, it the bank imagined. Jim had recently signed a firm contract for a plant expansion that would require an additional $12,750,000 of capital during the first quarter of 2007 as a result of the expansion. In his view, once the new production facility went on line, the company would be able to increase output in several segments of the shipping container market. It might have been possible to cut back on the expansion plans and to retrench, but because of the signed contruction contracts and the cancellation charges that would be imposed if the plans were canceled, Jim correctly reaards the $12,750,000 of new capital as being essential for Gargen State's very survival.