Liquor and Liquidity

For foreign creditors struggling with Asia’s tortuous debt restructurings, events last month at Korean liquor maker Jinro could well offer something to cheer about. On May 14, the Seoul District Court ruled in favour of a petition filed by US investment bank Goldman Sachs and appointed a receiver...

By Chirs Leahy • June 1, 2003

Reporting for Duty

If you want to know what Ken Lever thinks about shareholder value, look no further than the annual report at Tomkins, the £3.4 billion (€4.7 billion) UK engineering conglomerate where he’s CFO.Since joining Tomkins four years ago, he’s been pumping more and more information into the firm’s annual...

By Ben McLannahan • June 1, 2003

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

How to Improve Performance Management

State-of-the-art software systems can help finance become a more efficient collector and analyst of data, well-equipped to model and test the impact of changes both within and external to the organization — and able to share that power with other parts of the enterprise. These systems allow budge...

By Randy Myers • June 1, 2003

Three Gorges: Dam Expensive

Yichang, a city built on the banks of a murky section of the great Yangtze River, a team of investment bankers from China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) is working round the clock to help Yangtze Electric Power obtain an A-share listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Hard...

By Yang Jian • May 9, 2003

Through the Looking Glass

The conduit, that odd species of special purpose entity, is all the rage among the region’s universal banks. Citigroup, HSBC, Standard Chartered, ING, Bank of America and ABN AMRO make wide use of them for the simple reason that conduits allow them to exploit an equally peculiar regulatory loopho...

By Jasper Moiseiwitsch • May 1, 2003

Standing Up to SARS

There’s a certain zest brought on by a crisis that suits Martin Cubbon, group finance chief of Swire Pacific, a Hong Kong — based conglomerate that owns beleaguered airline Cathay Pacific. Even as the deadly Sars virus rampages across Asia, he coolly taps his fingers on his desk and rattles off c...

By Tom Leander and Abe De Ramos • May 1, 2003

Good News, Bad News

From a fundraising perspective, it’s hard to quibble with Deutsche Telekom’s debut mandatory convertible bond issue. For one thing, the deal raised over E2 billion for the cash-strapped German telecoms giant in a single morning in February. For another, the funds are recognised as equity capital ...

By Ian Rowley • May 1, 2003

How’m I Doing?

Companies expend a lot of effort (and money) in assessing where they are and where they’re going, but even the best don’t think they do it very well. The Hackett Group, which benchmarks best practices at more than 2,000 companies, found that only a third of the companies it classifies as “world-c...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 17, 2003

Boo-hoo Economics

Uncertainty about a potential war in the Middle East is causing much consternation among finance chiefs. In fact, CFOs are gloomier about the short-term economic prospects for the United States than they’ve been since December 2001, when the specter of recession loomed.According to our quarterly ...

By Joseph McCafferty • March 1, 2003

SSCs: Are They Dinosaurs?

If you want to know why shared service centers (SSCs) keep CFOs awake at night, Ric Piper could probably tell you. Until last October, Piper was group finance director of WS Atkins, an £806 million ($1.328 billion) U.K. engineering consultancy whose SSC in a small town in the west of England was ...

By Janet Kersnar • Feb. 1, 2003

The Downside of Downsizing

Companies thought that recent cost cuts would push them out of the doldrums — or at least boost earnings enough to please shareholders. That hasn’t happened. Is another round of cuts in order?Lawrence Serven, a principal at ButtonwoodLLP.com, a Stamford, Connecticut-based management-consulting fi...

By Lynn Doan • Feb. 1, 2003

Business Intelligence: Mastering Data

Cognos Inc.’s successful bid for rival Adaytum Inc. last December (see “Adaytum: An Addendum,” below) is just one indication that the business-intelligence (BI) software market is heating up. Analysts expect further consolidation as software firms battle in a large ($11 billion, according to IDC ...

By Scott Leibs • Feb. 1, 2003

The Five-Year Itch

Next to preparing the annual budget, the exercise that many CFOs dread most is creating a five-year plan. The document can take months to craft, is impossible to get right, and generally becomes obsolete within six months. Why, then, are companies still wedded to it?The answers are varied. Some C...

By Kris Frieswick • Feb. 1, 2003

The Big Squeeze: Our Ninth Annual Cost Management Survey

It’s not for lack of trying.Faced with continued economic turmoil and uncertain revenue streams, companies everywhere are scrambling to cut costs as much as they can. But because of the speed and ferocity of this particular downturn relative to the free spending of the peak boom years, those effo...

By Lori Calabro • Feb. 1, 2003

The Search for Intelligence

Sometimes, getting smarter requires a little dumbing down.Take the case of Deltek Systems, the Herndon, Virginia-based application software provider. A few years back, management at Deltek wanted to improve the way workers made decisions. After looking at several approaches, Deltek executives dec...

By Russ Banham • Jan. 1, 2003

Data Data Everywhere

The goal of business intelligence is a simple one: to turn data into information. In theory, that digital alchemy should help managers and employees make quick, well-informed decisions.There’s one hitch, though. Too much information — or the wrong information — can leave employees awash in data.J...

By Russ Banham • Jan. 1, 2003

Business Intelligence Software Vendors

Actuate Corp.Actuate Information Delivery PlatformAllen Systems Group Inc.Report.Web, Safari InfoServer, Safari InfoToolAlphaBlox CorpFinancial Planning and Analysis, KPI Dashboards, Sales and Operational Planning and ForecastingAonix Inc.Nomad, UltraQuest ReporterApplix Inc.iTM1Arcplan Inc.Dynas...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 31, 2002

IT Budgets Hit the Wall

An October report from research and consulting firm Meta Group Inc. painted a bleak picture for information technology budgets, suggesting that anticipated increases are largely illusory and, worse, that cost-cutting efforts have now “hit the wall.” According to lead author and executive vice pre...

By Scott Leibs • Dec. 1, 2002

Next Year Looks Better, Say CFOs

The U.S. economy is once again poised to take a run at a recovery, say CFOs, but concerns about future prospects at home and abroad linger. Certainly turmoil at the Securities and Exchange Commission has done little to allay those concerns. But the hope that the wave of big accounting scandals is...

By Joseph McCafferty • Dec. 1, 2002

Partial Clearing

If the reach of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 can be measured by marketing spin, then Congress has indeed instituted sweeping corporate reform. After the legislation passed, vendors of all kinds of business software, including budgeting and planning tools, were quick to tout their applications a...

By Tim Reason • Dec. 1, 2002

Travel Savings Start at Home

Companies can cut T&E costs significantly only if demand is managed as rigorously as supply. The savings extracted from rationalizing the supply chain can easily be cancelled out if employees are spending more than they should.The first and most obvious cost-cutting measure is to eliminate un...

By Jennifer Caplan • Dec. 1, 2002

Strategic Sourcing: New Leverage for Lower Travel Costs

Facing a dim near-term outlook for revenues, corporate managers are once again taking a good hard look at their travel and entertainment expenses. Although business travel declined significantly after 9/11, expenses for airfares, hotel rooms, and car rentals continue to make up a large portion of...

By Jennifer Caplan • Dec. 1, 2002

Baseball, Apple Pie, and Corporate Scandals

As a rule, baseball fans tend to have real long memories.Much to the chagrin of managers and players, fans of the national pastime keep remembrances of bad trades and butchered balls alive for decades — long after the misdeeds have yellowed in newspaper archives.Amazingly, Boston Red Sox follower...

By Marie Leone • Oct. 20, 2002

The Case Against the Business Case

It is often said — particularly by those who engage in such behavior — that rules are made to be broken. Sometimes recklessness is rewarded, but more often it’s fatal.Most of us, for example, would never intentionally run a red light. But a great many of us have rolled through the occasional stop...

By Scott Leibs • Oct. 15, 2002

Any Happy Returns?

Seven years ago, when David Lifschitz hired on as both the CFO and CIO at Los Angeles-based Gehr Enterprises, he did the unthinkable — he pulled the plug on the privately held company’s MRP project, then in the second phase of implementation. “I saw immediately that we were heading into more and ...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 15, 2002