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QBUS6860
Visual Data Analytics
Weekly Assignment 10
Dr Demetris Christodoulou
Discipline of Accounting
MEAFA Research Group
http://sydney.edu.au/business/research/meafa
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Weekly Assignment 10
o You Weekly Assignment 10 is concerned with analyzing the graph
objective “How capital investment determines sales revenue”
o To complete the graph objective you are required to analyse how
company performance in terms of sales revenue is determined by
capital investment for manufacturing companies that operate in the
industry of Semiconductors & Related Devices
o The analysis must be done irrespective of company or financial year.
That is, we are interested in understanding the typical or average
relation between sales revenue and capital investment across all
firms and years.
o There is no need to do research on this topic.
o You can get the dataset capital_investment.csv in Canvas under
Datasets used in lectures and assignments.
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Weekly Assignment 10
o The dataset contains information about capital investment and
related transactions. This is real data concerning real companies that
was obtained from an archival commercial database. The dataset
contains the following variables (financials are in millions of US$):
– id: the company identifier
– fyear: the financial year when the financials are reported
– sales: the sales revenue flow for the financial year
– ppe: the accumulated stock of capital investment as measured by
property, plant and equipment assets
– capx: the added capital expenditure flow for that financial year
that increases ppe
– dep: the depreciation expense flow for that financial year that
decreases ppe
– other: contains other transactions and accounting adjustments that
may increase or decrease ppe for that financial year
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Weekly Assignment 10
o With respect to the data generating process, it is important to note
that the following accounting relation holds at any given point in
tiem, for every company and financial year t:
o From this relation, it is important to know that ppe is a ‘stock’
variable that accumulates over time, whereas capx, dep and other
are periodic ‘flow’ variables that measure the increase or decrease
in the capital ppe from one year t-1 to the next year t
o The graph objective is defined as “How capital investment determines
sales revenue”. Note the direction of the relation described – given
the level of capital investment there will be more or less sales
revenue
PPEt−1 +CAPXt −DEPt +Othert = PPEt
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Weekly Assignment 10
o You are required to assume the role of a consultant to one of these
companies and adopt an exploratory type of approach in order to
discover how sales revenue is determined by capital investment.
o You are required to produce suitable EDA and VDA output with
convincing arguments that will be presented to one of these
companies and could provide a sufficient answer to this graph
objective.
o You are required to produce specific recommendations of how a
company in the industry of Semiconductors & Related Devices can
boost its sales revenue using capital investment. You must be specific
in your recommendations. Any generic statements will not be
accepted. You need to inform exactly what needs to change and by
how much in order to improve company performance and by which
specific amount.
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Weekly Assignment 10
o You are free to manage the data using any software and you are
also free to use Stata to perform EDA. You can include any Stata
output in your report that may help you support your arguments
o However, you must produce a high-quality static data graph (i.e. not
interactive) produced using Tableau, that would be attached on the
report and presented to a company for drawing fast and accurate
conclusions.
o You are required to submit a Word file report documenting your
data management, data choices, EDA, VDA and any lessons and
specific recommendations learned from solving the graph objective
that could be presented to a company for decision making