M&A Dollar Volumes Drop 80%

Excepting Apache’s $2.85 billion purchase today and a handful of other transactions, it’s been a horrid start for mergers and acquisitions. While some single-digit billion-dollar deals have closed this year, there have been no blockbusters. And the total volume of deals has fallen drastically fro...

By Vincent Ryan • Jan. 23, 2012

Schwab Throws Wrinkle into 401(k) Market

For the past year, buzz in the 401(k) arena has been all about the new disclosures regarding plans’ administration fees that plan participants will start receiving this year. Experts expect that more than a few participants will panic, given new awareness of how much their plans cost to run.Amid ...

By David McCann • Jan. 20, 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

Damn the Economy: Company Profitability Full Speed Ahead

The limping economy and last year’s lackluster stock market have masked a stunning fact about corporate profitability:  It is the best it has been in at least 15 years, and possibly the best ever. The aggregate EVA margin (economic profit as a percentage of sales) of the 1,702 companies in the CF...

By Al Ehrbar • Jan. 17, 2012

M&A: Running on Energy

Merger and acquisition activity may be off to a slow start this year, but there’s plenty of energy in the market for takeovers — the kind of energy that heats homes and powers cars. In fact, the energy sector is the only industry with any semblance of a deal-making trend in North America to start...

By Vincent Ryan • Jan. 10, 2012

Up at Bat

Hillerich & Bradsby is the unassuming name behind a powerful American brand: baseball’s Louisville Slugger. With about 70% of Major League Baseball players using the company’s customized wooden bats and hundreds more athletes using its other products, including Bionic gloves and Powerbilt gol...

By Alix Stuart • Jan. 5, 2012

The 2012 To-Do List for Acquirers

Perhaps even more than usual, it’s tough to forecast what kind of year it will be for mergers and acquisitions. Globally, 2011 was the busiest year for M&A since 2008, according to mergermarket. Activity from private-equity buyouts strengthened, with the value of deals climbing 15.3% and the ...

By Vincent Ryan • Jan. 5, 2012

IPO Outlook 2012: Tempered

There are a lot of ways the capital markets could improve in 2012, but becoming a hotbed for new equity issuers is not likely one of them, at least according to a recent survey of about 100 investment bankers.As of last month, only half are predicting an increase in initial public offerings in 20...

By Alix Stuart • Jan. 3, 2012

Best of 2011: Growth Companies

This year, CFO inaugurated its growth companies beat to focus on the companies that give hope to the country’s economic future: those that are increasing sales, staffing up, and moving into new markets with enthusiasm. Since chaos tends to accelerate approximately as fast as revenues – or perhaps...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Dec. 29, 2011

QuickBooks Today and Tomorrow

Having problems with QuickBooks? Neil Williams wants to hear about them. As CFO of Intuit, the company that owns QuickBooks (among other product lines), Williams says one of his main missions is to stay close to customers and understand their frustrations. To that end, he and other senior executi...

By David Rosenbaum and Alix Stuart • Dec. 21, 2011

New Outlook for the New Year?

CFOs are slightly more optimistic than they were three months ago, despite the ongoing European debt crisis and continued uncertain demand at home. According to the latest Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, finance executives rate their optimism about the U.S. economy at...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Dec. 15, 2011

Do You Need to Pack In Your Employees?

Your company is growing. Actually, “growing” is a pretty tepid word for what’s going on. You doubled your head count this year, and expect the same number of new folks on board next year. Where are you going to put them?One answer: pack ’em in. Tear down the cubicles. Open space is “in.”Start-up ...

By David McCann • Dec. 13, 2011

Contending with a Product Boom at Chobani

In the 1990s, high-tech companies yearned to get to a point in the technology adoption life cycle called “just ship.” Based on the models of Silicon Valley consultant Geoffrey Moore, the just ship phase was when the buying population of a product exploded and it was all the company could do to ge...

By Vincent Ryan and David McCann • Dec. 9, 2011

On the Fast Track: NineSigma

Innovation — as in, Where’s the money coming from next? — is an inescapable topic for most CFOs today. That includes Bill Chorba, CFO of NineSigma. He has one advantage, however: innovation is his company’s core product.NineSigma, an 11-year-old privately held firm with less than $50 million in a...

By Alix Stuart • Dec. 8, 2011

7 Easy (and Cheap) Ways to Develop Employees

Michael Lehman, former CFO of Sun Microsystems, has always placed a high priority on supporting employee development. Bolstered by big-company resources and ambitious rotation programs at Sun, his philosophy has helped propel at least eight of his former employees into large-company CFO roles, an...

By Alix Stuart • Dec. 7, 2011

Think Twice Before Growing That Product Line

Growth companies may view the development of a robust product line as the ticket to financial success, but in doing so they may be contributing to a flourishing societal malaise and actually acting to deter potential customers from buying their wares.People in developed countries have long accept...

By David McCann • Dec. 6, 2011

Mergers under a Microscope?

Antitrust lawyers at the Department of Justice had a busy year in 2011. In late August, the department filed a lawsuit to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, the third deal it has opposed this year, along with H&R Block/Tax Act and a deal involving a small poultry-processing company. In...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 1, 2011

Rebuilding, Slowly

Mortgage-backed securities. Collateralized debt obligations. NINJA mortgages. Neg-am loans. What was once arcane real-estate jargon became the language of the Great Recession, as the bursting of the housing bubble sent the economy downhill faster than a mortgage broker could say “Approved!”Over t...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Dec. 1, 2011

When Relocating Employees, Send Them Here

CFOs don’t have to worry too much about sending employees to Vienna, but they might want to budget for extra compensation for those being sent to Baghdad, according to a newly released study by Mercer. The 2011 Quality of Living survey ranks more than 200 cities according to their quality of life...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 1, 2011

Putting a Price on Patents

When Marc Linden was CFO at Mirapoint, an e-mail security provider, the firm regarded a patent that it held on an e-mail storage system as a competitive advantage. But as time passed, the patent started to lose its luster as the entire industry moved to more-advanced systems. Mirapoint — and Lind...

By Marielle Segarra • Dec. 1, 2011

The True Cost of Going Public

Most studies of the costs associated with initial public offerings focus on the dollars needed to comply with everyone’s favorite bugbear, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. According to conventional wisdom, it’s those compliance costs that are holding back companies from going public and choking the capita...

By Alix Stuart • Dec. 1, 2011

On the Fast Track: High Street Partners

Two years ago, High Street Partners (HSP), an international business-services firm that helps companies expand globally, was a fast-growing company with about 80 employees and 200 clients. Today it’s an even faster growing company, with double the number of customers and double the number of empl...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 29, 2011

M&A’s Preholiday Upswing

A spurt of merger and acquisition deals last week and a couple of large transactions earlier this week could portend a bright opening to 2012, but don’t count on it. M&A bankers are reporting that their conversations with corporate clients are “aspirational” rather than transaction-specific. ...

By Vincent Ryan • Nov. 22, 2011

The Top and Bottom 25: EVA Momentum Ranking of Large Companies

Large companies — those with annual revenues north of $5 billion — make up 21% of the companies in the CFO/EVA Dimensions profitability performance ranking of all nonfinancial companies in the Russell 3000 with revenues above $100 million. Interestingly, the biggest companies are underrepresented...

By Al Ehrbar • Nov. 22, 2011

Commercial Insurance Prices Going Up

A near decade of declining rates for three out of four commercial lines of insurance seems to have ended. A recent benchmarking survey shows a slight uptick for general liability, property, and workers’ compensation.   In the third quarter, the average renewal premium rose 1.2% for general liabil...

By Sarah Johnson • Nov. 17, 2011

401(k)s: Watch Out For Speed Bumps

The headlines about 401(k) plans vaunt the perils of employers offering employees too few investment choices, or too risky ones, or ones with fees that are too high. But none of those are Chris Beck’s problem. Instead, Beck, CFO of BirdDog Solutions, a private-equity-backed logistics provider, is...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 15, 2011