Mixed Picture on Earnings

Although a number of high-profile companies such as General Electric, Yahoo, Alcoa, and Intel have missed Wall Street earnings estimates, the fourth quarter of 2005is shaping up as a pleasant surprise by analyst standards.Of the 241 Standard & Poor’s 500 companies that had reported earnings a...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 30, 2006

Small Companies Note Pricing Pressures

The biggest concern among small-company senior executives is the difficulty of passing on rising costs to customers, according to a new survey by Merrill Lynch.Merrill polled CEOs, CFOs, and COOs at 168 companies with market capitalizations between $88 million and $2.4 billion (as of December 200...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 26, 2006

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

The Joy of Text

Randy Collica is a modern-day treasure hunter. As a senior business analyst in Palo Alto–based Hewlett-Packard Co.’s customer data and knowledge services department, his job is to mine data in search of insight that can help marketers better understand various customer segments. He stumbled upon ...

By Yasmin Ghahremani • Jan. 24, 2006

It’s In Here Somewhere

Anyone who has ever prepared a tax return knows the feeling: somewhere in that vast pile of bank statements, canceled checks, credit-card receipts, W-2s, checklists, worksheets, and sundry other paperwork lies the one piece of data you need right now to complete line 37b. But where in the name of...

By John Edwards • Jan. 24, 2006

Pay-disclosure Break for Foreign Issuers

Foreign companies listed on U.S. exchanges may not be required to comply with all of the newly proposed rules regarding of executive compensation.Looming large in last week’s proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission is the requirement that U.S. companies must disclose annual compensatio...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 23, 2006

New Jobless Claims at Six-year Low

New jobless claims sank to a six-year low last week, according to the Department of Labor. The number of U.S. workers filing for first-time unemployment benefits fell to 271,000 from a revised 307,000 the prior week.This was the largest one-week drop since late September, according to Reuters. As...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 19, 2006

What’s My Metric? Electric-power CFOs

It seemed like a good idea at the time. In 2000, eager to capitalize on Enron’s recent success in electric-power trading, executives at Allegheny Energy Inc. launched their own trading business.Before that, the Greenburg, Pennsylvania-based company operated in a regulated market; it sold its elec...

By Marie Leone • Jan. 18, 2006

China-U.S. Trade Imbalance Surges

The global love affair with goods made in low-cost China has resulted in a tripling of that country’s trade surplus with the rest of the world, to a record $102 billion, according to published accounts of a Chinese government report.China reported total foreign trade exceeding $1.4 billion, accor...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 12, 2006

U.S. GAAP Won’t Fly North of the Border

Canada’s Accounting Standards Board (AcSB) has decided to scrap the standards known as Canadian GAAP, but not in favor of the U.S version.Instead, reported the Toronto Globe and Mail, during the next five years or so, Canada will align its accounting rules with international financial reporting s...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 11, 2006

Bayes Rules

Science, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two e...

By Economist Staff • Jan. 5, 2006

Small Companies Woo Finance Staffers

Competition for financial executives may be heating up in 2006. That’s good news for job candidates, but it will pose some challenges for smaller businesses.“About 80 percent of small to midsized companies believe they will invest in hiring in 2006, not just to replace, but to add staff,” says Mi...

By Helen Shaw • Jan. 4, 2006

View from Asia: What’s Old about ”New” Japan?

In Japan, businessmen share a passion for golf. So naturally, Shunsuke Takeda, the CFO of financial-services group Orix, turns to the sport to describe his beliefs about corporate governance. “You can own the most sophisticated, highly engineered clubs,” he says, “but the only thing that matters ...

By Tom Leander • Jan. 4, 2006

Independence Air to Shut Down Operations

Independence Air has been grounded.Citing financial difficulties, FLYi Inc. — the corporate parent of the upstart, low-fare airline — announced that it will discontinue all scheduled flights after 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 5.The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November, added ...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 3, 2006

Simplicity Is Golden

It’s not all fun and games in the amusement-park business.Just ask Gary Neveras. As senior director of financial planning analysis at Universal Orlando, Neveras is responsible for tracking and forecasting the numbers on more than 1,000 different ventures and projects at the theme park. “We have t...

By John Edwards • Jan. 3, 2006

International Rectifier’s Mike McGee

You think your commute is long? Don’t complain to Mike McGee. For five years (2000–2005), McGee served in two executive capacities: as CFO of International Rectifier, an El Segundo, California-based power semiconductor company, and as co-CEO and chairman of Nihon Inter Electronics Corp. in Japan....

By Lori Calabro • Jan. 1, 2006

The Lowdown

Energy prices, higher interest rates, and the potential for inflation continue to fuel concern among CFOs about the prospects for the economy. According to the Duke University/CFO Business Outlook Survey, just 32 percent of finance chiefs are growing more optimistic about the direction of the U.S...

By Joseph McCafferty • Jan. 1, 2006

Planning and Decision Making: Out of Sync?

Companies that develop their strategy continuously average more than twice as many major business decisions each year as do companies that go through the familiar annual planning process.That’s one major finding of a new survey of 156 senior executives at companies worldwide with sales of at leas...

By Dave Cook • Dec. 29, 2005

Sitting Tight: The 2005 Capital Spending Scorecard

After two years of decline, U.S. companies increased their capital spending modestly in 2003 and 2004, but the amount is still sharply lower than its peak in 2000. Petrochemical companies led the rebound, investing billions to upgrade old refineries and increase capacity, while the electronics an...

By Ronald Fink • Dec. 29, 2005

IASB Names Replacement for Volcker

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, a founding member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, will replace former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker at the helm of the foundation that oversees the International Accounting Standards Board, effective January 1.Sir David Tweedie, IASB’s chairman...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 27, 2005

Days of Wine and Mergers

In 1985, legendary wine critic and industry shaker Robert Parker did something he had never done before: he gave a bottle of California wine a 100 rating. The perfect score went to a 1985 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon produced by a struggling start-up, Groth Vineyards & Winery. In Napa Valley, t...

By John Goff • Dec. 27, 2005

View from Europe: Crossing the Atlantic

In 1967, Le Defi Americain (The American Challenge) shot up the best-sellers’ list in France. Its author, the flamboyant intellectual Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, predicted that a growing number of U.S. multinationals crossing the Atlantic would use their superior management techniques, technol...

By Janet Kersnar • Dec. 27, 2005

Senate Approves $40 Billion Budget Cut

The Senate approved $39.7 billion in spending cuts after Vice President Cheney rushed back from a trip to the Middle East to cast the tiebreaker in a 51-to-50 vote.Five Republican senators voted against the measure, according to published reports.The bill now returns to the House, which passed a ...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 21, 2005

The Role of Regulation in Strategy

For companies in many nations, regulatory policy increasingly shapes the structure and conduct of industries and sets in motion major shifts in economic value. In network industries such as airlines, electricity, railways, and telecommunications, as well as in banking, pharmaceuticals, retailing,...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Dec. 14, 2005

How to Cope with Too Much Growth

There are few more self-evident financial truisms than the assertion that growth is a good thing for a company. But for a small business just getting started, an overwhelming amount of it can present problems. That’s what happened to John and Kira’s Jubilee Chocolates, a private Philadelphia comp...

By Lisa Yoon • Dec. 13, 2005

U.S. Productivity Up 4.7 Percent in Q3

U.S. nonfarm productivity grew 4.7 percent in the third quarter, revised upward from an earlier estimate of 4.1 percent, the Department of Labor reported.One reason for the improvement: Labor costs fell 1.1 percent during the third quarter after dropping 0.9 percent during the prior three months,...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 6, 2005