Profit Management as an Instrument for SMEs Developing: the Case for Slovakia

Abstract

The goal of the business should reflect its efforts to achieve a certain future state. Classical economic theories emphasize the achievement of profit as a fundamental goal of business. Modern theories consider gaining profit as one of the basic motivating factors. In practice, we distinguish several profit categories that are described in our contribution. The effort of businesses is detection of indicators that help enterprises to generate profit. In our contribution, we focused on the analysis of the profitability of small and medium-sized enterprises as well as on the identification of indicators that significantly influence the rate of profit. In our research we worked with a sample of 9,500 Slovak small and medium-sized enterprises. It was primarily a limited liability company with domestic ownership. We mainly focused on this type of businesses because many authors emphasize the irreplaceable role of small and medium-sized enterprises in countries' economies. Small and medium-sized enterprises play a very important role not only in Slovakia but also in the global economy. The significantly influence the creation of hundreds of jobs, regional development or a high percentage of GDP. Approximately 98% of enterprises in the Slovak Republic fall into the category of small and medium-sized enterprises. For their functioning, it is very important to have the capital that they inevitably need, either for the start of business as such, for development. However, these type of businesses does not always have easy access to financing, especially in the case of bank loan financing. Profit for SMEs is a very important internal source of funding. The aim of our paper is profit analysis and identification of the main profit-taking indicators. The analysis of the profitability was conducted by using methods of descriptive statistics. Based on the studied literature, we selected individual profit categories as basic indicators of profitability as well as selected indicators of profitability that are defined below. Pearson's correlation coefficient and the one-way ANOVA were used to examine the relationship between the selected indicators and achieved profit. Graphs and charts are used to clear the processing of the results of our research. Keywords: ANOVA, cash management, earnings before interest and taxes, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, net operating profit after tax, earnings before interest after taxes, Pearson correlation coefficient.