Putting It Together — Company Analysis
Knowing the three financial statements individually is like knowing the notes on a piano — the real skill, the one that actually helps you pick better investments, is reading them together as one coherent story about a business.
Reading three statements as one picture
Each statement you've studied in this unit answers a different question, and none of them alone is enough. The income statement asks: is the business profitable? The balance sheet asks: what does it own, what does it owe, and how risky is its financial position? The cash flow statement asks: is that profit actually turning into real cash? A company only looks genuinely healthy when the answers line up: rising revenue and margins on the income statement, a manageable debt load and growing equity on the balance sheet, and strong, growing operating and free cash flow on the cash flow statement. When these three stories disagree — say, rising profit alongside falling cash flow and growing debt — that disagreement is usually the most important thing in the entire filing, and it's exactly what a careful analyst goes looking for.
Key ratios that tie the statements together
Ratios are the tools that let you compare businesses of very different sizes on a level footing, and most of the important ones pull numbers from more than one statement at once.
| Ratio | Formula | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| P/E (Price-to-Earnings) | Share price ÷ Earnings per share | How much investors pay for each dollar of current profit |
| P/B (Price-to-Book) | Share price ÷ Book value per share | How the market values the company relative to its accounting net worth |
| EV/EBITDA | Enterprise value ÷ EBITDA | A valuation measure that accounts for debt, useful for comparing companies with different leverage |
| ROE (Return on Equity) | Net profit ÷ Shareholders' equity | How efficiently a company turns shareholders' money into profit |
| Debt/Equity | Total debt ÷ Shareholders' equity | How leveraged, and therefore how risky, the company's balance sheet is |
No single ratio tells the whole story on its own — a low P/E might mean a bargain, or it might mean the market rightly expects trouble ahead. Ratios work best used together and compared against direct competitors in the same industry, since "normal" levels vary enormously between sectors (a bank naturally carries far more debt relative to equity than a software company, for instance, simply because of how each type of business operates).
Red flags to look for
A handful of patterns should make any investor slow down and dig deeper: profit rising while operating cash flow falls or stays negative (recall Lesson 6.3); debt growing consistently faster than revenue or equity; margins steadily shrinking over several years, suggesting the company is losing pricing power or competitive edge; receivables (money owed by customers) growing much faster than revenue, which can mean sales are being recognised before cash is actually collected, or even before customers can really pay; and frequent, unexplained changes in accounting policies or auditors, which can sometimes signal an attempt to obscure a weakening picture. None of these automatically means fraud or failure — but each one is a legitimate reason to ask harder questions before investing.
Walkthrough: analysing Sea Limited
Sea Limited is a Singapore-headquartered technology company, listed on the NYSE, best known for Shopee (e-commerce), Garena (gaming, including the hit title Free Fire), and SeaMoney (digital financial services) — making it one of the most Singapore-relevant companies for this kind of analysis. The following figures are illustrative and rounded to approximate, publicly reported magnitudes for a recent fiscal year, meant to demonstrate the analysis method rather than serve as exact, current data — always check a company's latest official filings before making any real investment decision.
| Metric | Approximate figure | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | ~US$13B, growing double digits annually | A large, still-expanding business across e-commerce, gaming, and fintech |
| Gross margin | Improving over recent years | Growing operating discipline as the company matures past its early growth-at-all-costs phase |
| Net profit | Turned positive in recent years after a long period of losses | A business shifting from prioritising growth to prioritising profitability |
| Cash position | Substantial cash reserves relative to debt | Financial flexibility to weather a downturn or fund further investment |
Reading this as one picture: an investor would note that Sea spent years investing heavily to build market share across three different business lines, financing that growth partly through fundraising rather than existing profits (visible as financing cash inflows in past filings) — a pattern common among fast-growing technology companies but one that only works if profitability eventually arrives, which is exactly the transition Sea's more recent results suggest is underway. The next step for a real analysis would be comparing these figures against direct regional competitors like Grab, examining whether margin improvement is broad-based across all three segments or concentrated in just one, and checking whether cash flow (not just reported net profit) confirms the same improving trend.
You're comparing two competitors. One has ROE of 25%, the other 8%. What does this tell you — and what else would you need to know?
Reveal Answer
On the surface, the 25% ROE company is generating profit far more efficiently relative to its shareholders' equity than the 8% ROE company — turning each dollar of shareholder capital into roughly three times as much annual profit. But ROE alone can be misleading, because it can be inflated by high leverage: a company that finances itself mostly with debt has a smaller equity base sitting under the same profit, which mechanically boosts ROE without necessarily reflecting a better underlying business. Before concluding the first company is truly the better investment, you'd want to check each company's Debt/Equity ratio (is the high ROE coming from genuine operating efficiency or just heavier borrowing?), compare their profit margins and asset efficiency, look at whether their cash flow supports the reported profit, and check whether the two companies are similar enough in business model and industry to be fairly compared at all.