The Euro and the Euros: a Football Story

A top-flight international sporting event often takes peoples’ mind off the trials and tribulations they deal with every other day. In the case of the current football championship, Euro 2012, also known as the Euros, it probably won’t help at all.Sixteen national teams are taking part in the fou...

By Andrew Sawers • June 13, 2012

IT Outsourcing: What You Don’t Know Can Cost You

For many companies, operationalizing the management of IT-outsourcing contracts is becoming increasingly complex. While there’s no question that outsourcing can help fill gaps in IT  services, confusion about negotiated terms and conditions, a lack of transparency, and inadequate integration betw...

By Sunny Gupta • June 13, 2012

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

PE Firms Hunting for Health-Care, Services Deals

Private-equity firms are picky investors this year, but services and health-care companies are on their radar screens for potential takeovers and greater portfolio exposure. Both industries, PE firms say, will provide superior value in the current economic climate.The second-quarter Rothstein Kas...

By Vincent Ryan • June 13, 2012

The Risks that Lurk in the Cloud

While the lure of financial savings has quickly driven the use of cloud-computing service in the corporate sphere, not many senior executives have really examined the risks of using the cloud or how to deal with them. Adding to the problem is that it has been hard to identify exposures and obtain...

By Caroline McDonald • June 13, 2012

Health Insurers: We’ll Continue with Reforms, Regardless

[Editor’s note: this article, including the headline and sub-heading, have been updated from the original version because of additional announcements by insurers.]Just over two weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), three larg...

By David McCann • June 11, 2012

Facebook: The Sound of a Bubble Bursting?

In 1999 I was working at CIO magazine and chatting with Amar Goel, a former captain of the Harvard golf team. In 1995 Goel had founded Chipshot.com in his dorm room. It was an online business that sold golf equipment and allowed people to buy customized clubs by entering data about their physique...

By David Rosenbaum • May 30, 2012

European Crisis Chills U.S. Deal Making

If companies were spending gobs of money on acquisitions, or private-equity firms were making much headway on their mountains of committed capital, the deal counts and dollar volumes of mergers and acquisitions would be way up over last year. But they are not.May was another slow month for M&...

By Vincent Ryan • May 29, 2012

Unusual Suspects Show Up in Profit Ranking

The EVA Momentum ranking clearly debunks the notion that industry is destiny.  The top 25 companies in the ranking, which charts the profitability performance of companies in the Russell 3000 index, include ones from 19 different industries, ranging from likely winners in industries such as biote...

By Al Ehrbar • May 23, 2012

Wave of Consumer Spending Expected to Ebb

Will the consumer buoy the U.S. economy and corporate profits or drag them into the doldrums? The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee, economists, and CFOs are all trying to gauge whether the cyclical pickup in consumer spending will continue.Consumer credit and outlays rose in the fi...

By Vincent Ryan • May 17, 2012

You Can’t Ignore Timeline (Facebook Won’t Let You)

Facebook made the adoption of its Timeline content and layout mandatory on March 30 for all business pages. (Members posting personal profiles still have the option of using the old format.) The new design added a horizontal photo banner, a space for customizable apps, free analytic tools (Facebo...

By Bonnie Evans • May 15, 2012

How Crocs Regained Its Footing

Five years ago, everything was looking up for Crocs Inc. The casual-footwear company, which started selling its signature plastic clogs in 2002, had hit $100 million in sales by 2005. Its initial public offering the following year was the largest-ever U.S. footwear IPO, raising $208 million, and ...

By Edward Teach • May 15, 2012

Same Bump, Different Year

Nineteen venture-backed companies went public during the first quarter of this year, raising $1.5 billion and reflecting the highest number of such initial public offerings in the first quarter since 2007, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and business-data provider Tho...

By Sarah Johnson • May 15, 2012

Reining In Buyout Loans

Federal banking regulators want banks to tighten up the underwriting of leveraged loans, which are often used by private-equity firms in buyout transactions. They are recommending more-frequent stress-testing of such loans and want banks to delve deeper into whether the financial sponsors would i...

By Vincent Ryan • May 15, 2012

Offshore Suppliers: Beware of Hidden Costs

Rising wages abroad are a driving force behind more than a trend where a third of large U.S. manufacturers are considering whether to return production to the United States, according to The Boston Consulting Group. That shift in thinking, though, is not solely the result of rising wages in China...

By Shawn Casemore • May 14, 2012

The Burdens of Crowdfunding

What kinds of start-up and early-stage ventures will sell shares in their companies over the Internet?They probably won’t be the average pitch on Kickstarter, a self-styled “funding platform for creative projects”: the musician trying to fund his idea for a concept album, for instance, or the app...

By Vincent Ryan • May 9, 2012

Three Ways Small Business CFOs Can Reduce IT Costs

As CFO (and perhaps CIO) of a small business, you’re likely experiencing the growing cost of buying and maintaining all the technology that keeps your business running and your workforce productive.  And as the IT environment becomes increasingly complex — with new software-as-a-service (SaaS) ap...

By Singu Srinivas • May 8, 2012

LinkedIn Builds a Facebook for Grown-Ups

LinkedIn CFO Steve Sordello announced yesterday that the company’s first-quarter revenue rose to  $188.5 million compared with 2011’s $93.9 million, an increase of 101% that beat analyst expectations and caused the stock to rise more than 8% this morning. The company’s profits also doubled as it ...

By David Rosenbaum • May 4, 2012

Is There a Payoff from Top-Team Diversity?

There are many reasons companies with more diverse executive teams should outperform their peers: fielding a team of top executives with varied cultural backgrounds and life experiences can broaden a company’s strategic perspective, for example. And relentless competition for the best people shou...

By Markus Kleiner and Thomas Barta • May 2, 2012

10 Things You Just Gotta Have in Your Cloud Contract

In “Four Barriers to Cloud Due Diligence,” I explored a few factors that contribute to the complexity of performing due diligence on a cloud vendor.When an enterprise moves to the cloud, it hands off its servers, networks, and even its data to its provider. All that it’s left with is a contract. ...

By Rob Livingstone • April 30, 2012

Economic Gloom Gathering, Credit Managers Suggest

Economists have said many times since the 2008 financial crisis that the recovery will be a long time coming and that it will be hard. So far, optimistic signs have predominated during the first half of a given year, followed by reasons for pessimism about the U.S. economy.The latest monthly baro...

By Sarah Johnson • April 30, 2012

Midmarket Execs Forecast Slower Sales Growth

Middle-market companies expect revenue growth to moderate in the next 12 months, reflecting their lack of confidence in the U.S. and global economies and worries over higher health-care costs and new government regulations. All that is creating an uncertain financial picture for the firms, making...

By Vincent Ryan • April 27, 2012

Four Steps for Transforming Enterprise IT

With the growth in cloud-service offerings, and the increasing adoption of private, public, and hybrid cloud-computing strategies and practices within the enterprise, many people have begun discussing the future of the CIO and corporate IT. Will the IT department simply become a purchasing organi...

By Timothy Chou • April 27, 2012

Amazon Is All About Growth, Not Profits

Founded in 1994, taken public in 1997, Amazon.com recorded its first profit (to the surprise of many) in the fourth quarter of 2001. But Amazon has never been about profits. Indeed, Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak yesterday announced that the protean Internet retailer, cloud provider, digital content dist...

By David Rosenbaum • April 27, 2012

Why Netflix Keeps Apologizing

“I messed up,” Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a September 2011 blog, apologizing for the company’s July announcement that it would cleave its video-streaming business off from its DVD-by-mail service and charge customers separately for each, amounting to an abrupt, not to menti...

By David Rosenbaum • April 24, 2012

As Many Sellers as Buyers

Companies around the world are as much interested in divesting as they are in acquiring, with just 31% saying they expect to make an acquisition in the next 12 months and the same number expecting to divest, according to the latest M&A research from Ernst & Young.But the trend is going in...

By Andrew Sawers • April 23, 2012