MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HOCHIMINH CITY ---------------- TRẦN THỊ KIM PHƯỢNG DETERMINANTS OF FINANCIAL DISTRESS: A STUDY OF LISTED COMPANIES IN VIET NAM ECONOMICS MASTER THESIS Major: Business Administration Ho Chi Minh City - 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY ---------------- TRẦN THỊ KIM PHƯỢNG DETERMINANTS OF FINANCIAL DISTRESS: A STUDY OF LISTED COMPANIES IN VIET NAM ECONOMICS MASTER THESIS Major: Business Administration Major Code: 60.05 INSTRUCTOR: Võ Xuân Vinh, Ph.D Ho Chi Minh City - 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com i ABSTRACT This study focuses on researching the relationship between a set financial ratios and the probability of failure companies. Through the Logistic regression method, the results show that EPS, Cash per shares and Asset turnover are the most important financial ratios, which help investors to identify the financial distress of listed companies in Vietnam Stock Exchange. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ii ACKNOWLEGEMENTS During the time for conducting my thesis, I have been strongly supported by many people. Through these words, I would like to extend my sincere to all of them.
The first one I would like to express my sincere gratitude is my direct supervisor PhD. Vo Xuan Vinh, who provides me his great guidance day by day until completing the thesis. The next ones I would like to express my special gratitude are my family, who are always by my side and encourage me if necessary. Last but not least, my thesis would be nothing without the enthusiasm and information from my friends.
Tran Thi Kim Phuong Ho Chi Minh City, December 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iii STUDENT DECLARATION I hereby declare that the content in this thesis is my own, except for special references, quotations and summaries. All data, references using in this research are clearly identified. The thesis has not been accepted for any degree until now. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENT ABSTRACT.
ii STUDENT DECLARATION. iii TABLE OF CONTENT. iv LIST OF TABLES. vi Chapter 1: Introduction of the study .1 Rationale of the study .2 Research objectives and questions .3 Structure of the study.
4 Chapter 2: Literature Review .1 Definition of financial distress .2 Ratios in designing models .3 Techniques used in financial distress predictions .2 Selection of predictor variables. Data analysis and Findings. 23 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.2 Limitation of the research study.36 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1 Summary statistics. 23 Table 2 Variable correlation.
25 Table 3 The performance of logistic regression for 8 models. 26 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS HOSE: Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange MDA: Multiple Discriminant Analysis ANN: Artificial Neural Networks WOCA: Working capital GROPROM: Gross profit margin EPS: Earnings per share DEBTTOTAL: Total debt to total assets CASPSHARE: Cash flow per share ATURNOVER: Asset turnover SALEPERCA: Sales per cash SALEPERRE: Sales per receivables LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 1 Chapter 1: Introduction of the study 1.1 Rationale of the study The concept of “stock market” in the modern economy is the location for the trading activities of medium and long – term securities. The market participants including individual and institutional investors such as the mutual funds and the insurance companies perform the purchases and sale of stock for many different purposes involved in a good profit or taking over the control of the enterprise. However, the most benefit from the establishment of stock market is to bring the flexible source of capital financing the business’ operations.
For this reason, hundreds of the stock market has been set up after the first one, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and contributed significantly to the national economies. With the awareness of the stock market’s important role, the Securities Trading Center in Ho Chi Minh City, now called Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE), was established under the Decision No. 127/1998/QD- TTg dated 11/07/1998 and formally put into operation on 28/07/2000 with only two listed companies. From now on HOSE has many remarkable achievements.
For example, until 31/12/2007, there were about 507 listed companies with a total market value of 365 trillion, 3 securities investment funds and 366 the variety of bonds. The number of investor accounts opened at the securities companies were nearly 298 thousand accounts including over 7000 foreign investors. Vietnam Index, which represents the performance of Vietnamese companies trading on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, has LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 2 increased continuously in that period. This is the most splendid stage in the development of Vietnam Stock Exchange.
However, after a rapid and hot growth, the Vietnamese Stock Market in 2008 ended with a sharp decline and many listed companies have faced to financial difficulties. Under the major impact of the economic crisis, the total profit of all listed companies decreased to 30%. At the end of 2009, 23 out of 329 listed companies announced loss. The financial distress companies can cause some great damages to the market participants such as shareholders, creditors, managers, especially individual investors.
How do these investors protect them from this bad damage? Through many researches, one conclusion is declared that firms in the financially distress state have some particular characteristics relevant to losses, a high leverage, low and volatile stock returns, etc. Recognizing these signs is a way for warning not only investors but also enterprises in operation as well. Thus, there have been a number of qualitative and quantitative researches conducted to identify failing firms. However, the two most popular methods are Multiple Discriminant Analysis and Logistic regression.
These techniques combined with a set of financial ratios come up with the most famous two models, Altman’s Z score model (Altman 1968) and Ohlson’s model (Ohlson 1980). The research by Beaver (1966) and Altman (1968) focus on the main problem that is the predictable ability of model developed from financial ratios. Based on this classic research, the Z score model have been developed carefully through further studies of some researchers including Deakin (1972), Taffler ( 1985 ), Goudie (1987), Grice and Ingram (2001), Agarwal and Taffler (2007), and Sandin and Porporato (2007). LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 Similarly, other studies also have been performed relating to the Ohlson, including Lau (1987), Fauzias and Chin (2002), Boritz, Kennedy, and Sun (2007), Muller, Steyn-Bruwer, and Hamman (2009).
Nowadays, these financial distress techniques have been applied for many economical purposes. One of them is for credit analysis in financial institutions. If customers want to borrow loans, the financial institutions evaluate the credit worthiness of customers. In case of detecting the potential of falling into financial distress, some preventive methods may be implemented.
For example, they can reject loan applications or borrowers must take more steps aiming to avoiding loan defaults before receiving money. So which technique is the precise one? That is the argumentative question. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. The effectiveness of the methods might be high or low at different times.
The reason for this is that a person’s reaction to information is difficult to forecast. In a person’s behaviors, some basic trends and random elements stay together. With a collection of millions of investors, the probability of forecasting their behaviors is not as exact as predicting one person’s behaviors. Results from each research also depend on other factors such as the characteristics of each stock market, time for collecting data, etc.
For a long time, applying these techniques in predicting financial distress to Vietnam Stock Exchange is still not much while many publicly listed companies have fallen in to this stage. As a result, it is worthy to provide a research aiming to investigate the role of financial ratios in predicting financial distress, which is definitely relevant and useful for both LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 private entities and governmental institutions for assessing firms’ financial condition as well.2 Research objectives and questions a) Research objectives By means of the prior researches, the thesis’ primary objective is to clarify the relationship between financial ratios and the financially distress of listed companies in Viet Nam b) Research questions - Which is the suitable method to evaluate the impact of financial ratios on the probability of failure ? - How is the relationship between the financial ratios and the financial distress state of companies? 1.3 Structure of the study This research is divided into 4 chapters. Chapter 1 relates to introduce the general content of the research with research problem, research questions, and research objectives. A literature review of the financial distress prediction is scanned in Chapter 2.
Chapter 3 reveals analyses the data collected, and the final result of the research. Chapter 4 discusses conclusions and implications of the research. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 Chapter 2: Literature Review 2.1 Definition of financial distress It can be said that there are many definitions used in researches regarding financial distress. Dun and Bradstreet (1985) clarify the financial distress as the discontinuity of the business operation.
To Foster (1986), a company is in financial distress when it has serious liquidity problems settled through crucial changes in entity’s operation. Liquidity problem is known as a state where all company’s current obligations can not be strictly enforced. There also have been definitions of financial distress like reduction of dividend and defaults on debt. Moreover, some stages of financial difficulty are introduced through many researches such as three stages in Guthmann and Dougall (1952) with technical insolvency, debt burden unsupportable and reorganization; four stages of deterioration in Newton (1975) including incubation, cash shortage, financial insolvency and total insolvency.
Lau (1987) employs the five-state model to discover the financial distress while Somerville (1989) chooses a three - state model. In general, “financial distress” is a term indicated a condition when commitments to creditors of a company are broken or in difficulty. Sometimes financial distress can lead to insolvency. Thus, it requires each government in every country to issue some regulations on dealing with financial distress in the corporate sector.
That is one of the reason why there are quite much discussions defining failure legalistically. This kind of definition has a dominant advantage that it provides researches criterion to easily classify the distress and non – distress firms in the population being LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. For instance, in the study related to Malaysia Stock Exchange, the financial distress companies are defined according to the following options: a) Closing down under Companies Act 1965; b) Committing to a Scheme of Arrangement and Reconstruction; c) Restructuring debt under Corporate Debt Restructuring Committee; d) Selling the firms’ loans; and e) Restructuring small borrowers. To one research in United Kingdom, fail firms are selected in accordance with some regulations in Insolvency Act of 1986.
They are five courses of action: administration, company voluntary arrangement, receivership, liquidation and dissolution. In Viet Nam, according to the Law on the Bankruptcy of the National Assembly released dated 15 June 2004, a company is filed for bankruptcy because of not being able to pay the debt when it is due. However, this company still has a chance to recover its operation prior to the time when the High Court declares bankruptcy. All creditors organize a Conference to appraise, adjust the company’s rehabilitation plan for production and payment.
It encompasses a wide range of following measures: a) Mobilizing new capital; b) Changing production commodity; c) Technological innovation in production; d) Reorganizing the management system; merging or splitting the production department to improve productivity and quality of production; e) Selling shares to creditors; LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.