文档介绍：Making Pro Formas Perform
Stephen Bryan; Steven Lilien
Wake Forest University's Babcock Graduate School of Management; Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business
704 words
1 October 2003
Harvard Business Review
24
0017-8012
English
Copyright (c) 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
Companies claim that earnings reports based on generally accepted accounting principles distort performance. Their remedy is to counter with idiosyncratic adjustments to GAAP earnings, called pro formas. Analysts similarly modify earnings reports, adding their own estimated and actual earnings metrics to the mix. We say, the more the better—with one proviso.
The problem with these customized reports is that they’re opaque. In reporting Microsoft’s earnings, for example, one analyst concluded that pany’s actual earnings per share figure was more than 4,000% greater than the GAAP number. To reach this figure, the analyst had ignored Microsoft’s investment losses of $ billion yet included pany’s interest e of $825 million. Why? No explanation.
Skewed Performance
To find out panies’ and analysts’ adjustments to GAAP earnings vary, we analyzed quarterly earnings reports for the Dow 30 in 2001. Among this select group of firms, we found that earnings reports skewed in systematic ways. Companies’ pro forma earnings deviated the most from bottom-