关于商业的英语论文， 3000字左右

这是一篇关于商业投资的英语论文。
Are you investing in the right industry?

Does the term book-to-bill ratio sound familiar to you? Do you know the demand and supply numbers of private condominiums in Singapore for the next year ? If you do, you must have already performed some sort of industry analysis on the electronics and property industries (or sectors as commonly referred to in stockmarket terms).

Most investment processes include some sort of industry analysis. This is important because many studies have shown that over a period of time, some industries have per-formed better than others. For example, between 1987 and 1996, banking stocks in Singapore have generated better returns than other industries such as shiprepair. Industry analyses will uncover these performance differences and help identify both unprofitable and profitable opportunities
(situations).

It is also important to note that past performance alone will not help predict future performance. The factors or conditions that helped an industry to prosper in the past will change over time. Identifying and studying these factors will provide some clues to the entry and exit points of the investments. Going back to our earlier example, economic growth is an important criterion for banks' earnings. Between 1987 and 1996, Singapore enjoyed an uninterrrupted average GDP growth of 8.9%. This allowed the banks' earnings to grow at a compound rate of 11.3% when the broader market generated only 8.5% growth. With GDP growth decelerating because of the Asian crisis, can we maintain the same sanguine outlook for the banks?

Having determined that industry analyses are important for successful investing, the next step is to find out how we can go about doing one. There is no generic framework that is applicable to all industries, but there are commonalities which we can identify. In a free market economy, demand and supply are key determinants of price, and price is always an important contributor to any profit-driven organisation. Hence, a successful indstry ana-lysis will have to identify the underlying fac-tors driving demand and supply.

Factors that drive demand vary across industries, and are too numerous to list. However, it is important to note that demand can be categorised as "seasonal", "cyclical" or "secular". As the word suggests, seasonal fac-tors recur year after year. Cyclical factors, on the other hand, follow
very closely to the economic cycles of the market. Secular factors are more long term in nature. Seasonality or economic cycles will have minimal impact on secular trends.

Take an airline as an illustration. Most Singaporeans take their vacation in December. That is why airline seats are difficult to secure during that time. This is the seasonal factor because it occurs every year around the same time. Having said that, Singaporeans usually take vacations more frequently when the economy is doing well, and less so during reccessionary times. The rise and fall in demand in accordance to economic activities is the cyclical factor. Finally, the middle class population in Singapore has been rising over the last 20 years. This group is generally more affluent. Part of the lifestyle usually includes taking regular vacations to exotic destinations. Such lifestyle doesn't change annually, nor does it follow the ups and downs of economic growth. The demand for air travel will grow so long as the middle class population continues to
increase. This is an example of secular demand.

Classifying demand factors into these categories is very useful. As long-term inves-tors, we do not want to be constantly reacting to signs that are short term and volatile in nature such as seasonal, and to a lesser extent, cyclical trends. Buying and selling stocks based on these short-term trends are not only expensive (brokerage cost) but difficult to time as well. Instead, we should focus on long-term trends. They usually have a longer and more permanent impact on share prices.

A key factor in identifying an attractive industry is pricing power. The ability of an industry to price its product at a profitable level without compromising its business pros-pect is important, and this is affected by many factors. Inelastic demand allows the tobacco producers to maintain good profits despite the rapidly rising tariffs all these years. Barriers to entry is another factor. Mobile-phone charges used to be very expensive because there was only Singapore Telecom providing the ser-vice (monopoly). With increased competition from M1, rates have been declining gradually. All things being equal, the more competitive the industry is, the lower the pricing power, and hence profits. Competition may be good for the consumers, but it seldom benefits the shareholders. Another factor that will impact the com-petitive environment of an industry is the cost structure. In general, indsutries with high fixed costs are more competitive than those that have high variable costs. We often hear about coun-tries being accused of 'dumping steel' onto other countries. Well, this is the case in point. Steel mills are expensive to construct. But once built, the investment costs are 'sunked'. On the other hand, the running cost to produce steel is relatively low. Since there are so many steel mills around the world (almost every country has one for strategic reasons), supply is in abundance. As competition intensifies in the global market, recovering investment cost of the mills becomes a secondary objective for management. What is more important is to keep the production ongoing and sell the steel at a price that can at least cover the variable cost component. These mills will definitely be loss-making, but at least they can continue to operate and not generate serious unemploy-ment for the economy (steel industry is very labour-intensive). Having looked at the fundamental issues, do we always buy into an industry with positive trends developing? The answer is 'no'. Con-fused? Here is why. The key to any successful investments is to stay ahead of what the market is discounting. Suppose we are bullish on the outlook of the residential property sector because owning a home is every Singaporean's dream and the island has limited land supply. But this view is widely observable. Further-more, most of the residential property stocks have already outperformed the market by huge margins. These are signs that the market has probably discounted the positive conclusion of our analysis. As such, the investment upside is probably limited. Conversely, if our conclu-sion unearths new information from the gene-ral market, we may have discovered something interesting here. To confirm that we have a good find, check out the valuation to see if it is attractive. There are many valuation tools, but the commonly used ones are Price/Earnings (PE), Enterprise Value/EBITDA*, Price/Book(P/B), and Dis-counted Cash Flow (DCF). Make a cross-industry comparison as well as historical com-parison. Going back to our property example. If our conclusion is new to the market, the industry is trading at the lower end of its histo-rical PE band, and it is also very attractive on PE terms versus the other industries in Singapore...bingo! In conclusion, I would like to leave you with a brain teaser. Imagine this is 1996 and you are an investor looking at the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) industry: DRAM is a semiconductor chip used in most electronic products such as personal computers. The business is cyclical in nature because corporate and private consumption of PCs usually rises when the economy is doing well. There are, however, two secular trends that underpin the growth in the industry. First, more and more people are buying PCs for their home and oiffice. Second, the requirement of DRAM per PC is also on the rise as processing power of computer increases exponentially. On the competitive issue, the cost to build a wafer fab is extremely high (about US$1b), and the technology is usually state-of-the-art. Besides capital and technology, there are no other significant barriers to entry. Margin for the industry had been very good because of supply shortage. This probably explained why share prices outperformed the market in 1995. The historical five-year PE band for selected stocks in the industry between 1991 and 1995 was about 10 to 100. The average PE during the period was 30. The industry is currently trading at a PE in the low teens. Would you invest in this industry? (The writer is the Investment Manager of Jardine Fleming Investment Management. This column has the support of the Investment Management Association of Singapore and the Stock Exchange of Singapore.)