FOREWORD
The Bank of Korea is pleased to release the 2016 edition of its Financial Statement Analysis (FSA), published annually since 1960 to provide research on and analysis of the business performances and financial conditions of Korean corporations during the preceding fiscal year.
This edition contains the financial statement analysis report for Korean corporations during 2015, the concepts of and methods for calculating their major financial ratios, their financial statements including their balance sheets, income statements and statements of appropriation of retained earnings, and various indicators related to their growth, profitability and stability, all classified by industry and by company size. Quartile statistics for frequently used major indicators are also developed and released. To facilitate cross-country comparison, the major financial ratios of advanced countries such as the U.S., Japan and Germany are included as well.
For user convenience, the full text of this book is also available on the Bank of Korea’s website(www.bok.or.kr) and its Economic Statistics System website(ECOS, http://ecos.bok.or.kr). The related data files can also be found at the ECOS site.
We hope that this book will be helpful to companies in framing their business strategies, to the government sector in drawing up its economic policies, to financial institutions in assessing their credit risks, and to members of academia in their research. Finally, we wish to express our sincere appreciation to all of the cooperating institutions whose efforts have helped to make this work possible.
November 2016
Chung, Kyuil
Director General
Economic Statistics Dept.
The Bank of Korea