by Rachel Bradley
  Equity Analyst, Gradient Analytics LLC (a Sabrient Systems company)

While the accrual method of accounting has its usefulness, it also opens the door for companies to “manage” and even overstate earnings through various tactics – some merely aggressive, others more nefarious. There are a variety of levers that management can pull to either book expected revenue sooner than normal or push current expenses farther out into the future. However, earnings growth sourced this way is unsustainable. Unless the firm expects a massive boost in sales in the near future (such as from the rollout of a highly anticipated new product), sustaining the growth story would require not only continuing to pull revenue forward but to do so at an accelerating rate.

Pulling sales forward or pushing expenses farther down the road both overstate the firm’s sustainable earnings power and result in a presentation of financials that obfuscate reality. There is also a myriad of other tools available to dress up financial statements to present a firm that appears financially healthier than it truly is. A common way to pad the balance sheet is through so-called “soft assets,” i.e., goodwill and other intangibles like brands, logos, trademarks, corporate reputation, client lists, and contracts.

At Gradient Analytics we have a saying, “With soft assets, come soft profits.” Put another way, when a firm has material intangible assets and most of its valuation is tied to the terminal value dependent on a set of unrealistic assumptions, then earnings have a higher risk of write-downs. As an example, we take a deeper look at the financials of The Kraft Heinz Company (KHC), specifically examining some overly optimistic assumptions management used in valuing its soft assets. Read on….

By Nicholas Yee
Director of Research, Gradient Analytics LLC (a Sabrient Systems company)

Over the past five years, Gradient Analytics has observed a shift from companies making acquisitions for strategic purposes to companies acquiring mainly for short-term financial gains. This stems at least in part from investors and a sell-side community that have become complacent in accepting managements’ accounting statements at face value without looking “under the hood.” To be sure, the complexity of acquisition accounting and the opaqueness of financial performance analytics is daunting. Therefore, it is incumbent upon earnings quality analysts to try to understand whether a company’s senior management may have other motives fueling an acquisition platform (aka “roll-up”) strategy.

Where previously we might have screened for deteriorating free cash flow and accruals to identify poor earnings quality trends, we now find that some managers have been circumventing cash from operating activities (CFOA) and moving working capital into investing activities on the cash flow statement through acquisitions. Why is this important, you ask? Should analysts always lump the cash paid for an acquisition into free-cash-flow calculations? Not necessarily; there is no hard and fast rule here to put into an automated screener in this situation. Rather, our analysts must perform a deep dive to determine whether the company is a “serial acquirer.” Is this a one-time acquisition that integrates seamlessly into the parent company, or is this just one of a series of mediocre acquisitions used to aesthetically grow the top-line and obfuscate traditional performance metrics?  Read on....