Risk and Growth Analysis of Small and Medium Size Enterprises Between 2010 and 2012

Abstract

Abstract The paper is dealing with the analysis of the enterprise risk and growth of a selected number of anonymous small and medium size enterprises. The investigation is based on the enterprises’ simplified annual financial reports. In the economic environment of our days, the principle of “no risk means no profit” is widely accepted and supported. It can also be added, if there is no profit, there is no successful growth. By using leverage ratios, below we intend to analyze two basic types of enterprise risk: financial risk and operational risk. Several publications dealing with enterprise growth are available, yet none have yet been able to offer a common approach to this problem. In our publication enterprise growth is considered as the effective growth of certain economic indicators. We investigate internal and sustainable growth rates in the period of 2010-2013 in a sample of enterprises registered in County Bihor and operating in different sectors of economy. In the second part of the study, the investigated firms are grouped by calculated indicators based on their 2012 year's results by the method of cluster analysis. The calculations were carried out by the R statistics program which is used in a variety of research fields and has the advantage of being an open source software system. The program can offer the modules that are required for our analysis. For our cluster analysis we applied module ‘hclust’. The results of the analysis show that there are no significant changes in the internal and sustainable growth rates of the companies over the investigated period. The minor difference identified between the internal (IGR) and sustainable growth (SGR) rates can be considered as normal, since the investigated firms were using foreign sources as well in order to finance their activities. In terms of risk indicators, it was found that of the degree of operating leverage (DOL) and the degree of financial leverage (DFL) it is the degree of operating leverage that appears to be the major source of problems for the investigated firms. Thus, risk managers should be giving priority attention to minimizing it. Our analyses show that the majority (64%) of the enterprises have an acceptable level of risk.