Assess profitability of non-financial firms

This paper defines first profitability and its measurement. Net operating return on assets is shown to be the only kind of profitability that can be derived from business accounting data - adequately reprocessed - and provide relevant economic information. This requires to estimate the length of life of equipment in order to quantify its depreciation independently of corporate tax rules and the corresponding evaluation of assets. Various ways of reevaluation of assets are compared. The length of life is estimated for each category of assets, defined by both their type and the industry using them, by means of cumulated flows of investment. Such estimates of profitability are closer to those provided by the national accounts than to the estimates usually derived from business data. However, noticeable discrepancies between the first two remain in particular between the estimates of capital stock. Throughout the years 1985 to 2001 the proposed estimates are stable at circa 8% except a peak at the end of the 90s. This stability is the result of the decrease in the apparent capital productivity compensated by the upturn of the margin ratio.profitability, value of assets, length of life of equipment

Gazelles in France

As schumpeterian creative destruction is increasingly popular, this leads to focus on high-growth firms. These firms have been called gazelles by Birch. Among the SME employing 20 to 250 workers in 1993 and still alive in 2003, the top 5% of the distribution of growth - henceforth called gazelles - multiply their employment by 5 in 10 years. They create as many jobs as the 50% creating jobs at a more moderate rate (the other 45% loss jobs). Gazelles growth is uneven: half of their ten-year growth is concentrated on only one year. Gazelles defined on the basis of their growth between 1993 and 1998 do not create any more jobs on the following period, between 1998 and 2003. External growth, including mergers and acquisitions, accounts for a big part of gazelles growth: according to their size, gazelles belong more often to a group. Between1998 and 2001, period of strong growth, external growth accounts for one half of the growth of the gazelles. Every industry, even those in relative decline, has some gazelles. Gazelles in low growth industry grow mainly by external growth, which seems to correspond to a concentration process, possibly defensive.Growth, firms

French SMEs: profitable but not very dynamic?

If SMEs have below average mark-up ratios - gross operating profit over value added - it is because they are less capital intensive - less capital to be remunerated - and not because they are less profitable. On the contrary, their profitability appears higher both in terms of usual accounting ratios and when measured through their valorisation when taken over by groups. This does not mean that growth reduces profit and that SMEs have no incentive to grow. This strong profitability is less a matter of size than a matter of age. They become less profitable when getting old and this fall in profitability is more accentuated for those who do not grow. This higher profitability can result from a selection effect - only the best SMEs are able to survive. But, with or without selection, one result holds : the underinvestment of existing SMEs cannot be linked up with a problem of under-profitability. It is all the more true that over the last 15 years, the operating profitability of all non-financial societies slightly improved and, thanks to the fall interest rates, their financial profitability distinctly increased. As other firms, SMEs get out of debt, increase dividends and their shareholders equity. More than other firms, they accumulate cash reserves that substitute to short term credit lines, and whose dominant function is to provide a buffer against potential negative shocks, rather than to prepare future investements. This weakness of investment does not prevent these SMEs from being the main source of job creation. SMEs constitute a pool that feeds the development of bigger companies, either because some of these SMEs turn out to become big firms or because they are ultimately bought by larger groups.SME, profitability, investment

Job flows and worker flows: a reappraisal - Job flows scaled down and only moderately linked to worker flows

Job flows (job creations and job destructions) and worker flows (hires and quits) are central to recent analysis of labor market. The scale of gross job flows (creations + destructions) compared to net job flows (creations - destructions) has a part in the renewal of Schumpeterian analysis. It is usually accepted that gross job flows are roughly of the same magnitude in such different countries as France and the USA. This study takes advantage of the possibility to follow employees for two years - thanks to the DADS database - and improves the measure of job flows by eliminating spurious flows related to plants identifier changes. Thus job flows are divided by two and appear to be by far less important in France than in the USA. The same database allows the study of the link between job flows and worker flows. Churning flows (worker flows minus job flows) depend more on industry characteristics than on job flows. Their magnitude, scaled up by this study, reflects more the segmentation of the labor market than the strength of the creative destruction process.Job flows, worker flows, labor market

Corporate Product Diversification, Refocusing and Development of Functional Businesses in France (1993-2000)

In spite of prevalent views among economists and business management experts in favour of corporate focus development strategies still lack empirical evidence. The concepts of diversification and product refocusing of firms businesses are difficult to express with quantitative indicators, as the prevailing classification of economics activities hardly measures crucial notions such as core businesses or core competencies. However, we cannot do without this classification of economic activities, as we aim at an exhaustive description of the degree of diversification of medium-sized and big firms. Thus the first objective of this paper is to improve existing nomenclature-based indexes of diversification in two ways: first, we identify functional businesses (whose presence in firms does not strictly correspond to diversification) and remove them from diversification indexes. Second, we incorporate a measure of product heterogeneity into our index of diversification in the following way: the more atypical the portfolio of businesses of a given firm is relatively to other firms in our database, the more diversified it is. Functional businesses being removed, firms on French territory are not very diversified and this low average level of diversification did not change significantly between 1993 and 2000, as some firms diversified whereas others got more focused. The weight of functional businesses in multiple-output production has grown during the nineties, all the more as firms became more diversified and/or more international.Diversification, refocusing, business group, business portfolio

Demodulation of Spatial Carrier Images: Performance Analysis of Several Algorithms Using a Single Image

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11340-013-9741-6#Optical full-field techniques have a great importance in modern experimental mechanics. Even if they are reasonably spread among the university laboratories, their diffusion in industrial companies remains very narrow for several reasons, especially a lack of metrological performance assessment. A full-field measurement can be characterized by its resolution, bias, measuring range, and by a specific quantity, the spatial resolution. The present paper proposes an original procedure to estimate in one single step the resolution, bias and spatial resolution for a given operator (decoding algorithms such as image correlation, low-pass filters, derivation tools ...). This procedure is based on the construction of a particular multi-frequential field, and a Bode diagram representation of the results. This analysis is applied to various phase demodulating algorithms suited to estimate in-plane displacements.GDR CNRS 2519 “Mesures de Champs et Identification en Mécanique des Solide

Cell adhesion in free-standing multilayer films made of chitosan and alginate

The method for preparing multilayer ultrathin films by the consecu- tive deposition of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes has gained tre- mendous recognition due the user friendly preparation, capability of incorporating high loads of different types of biomolecules in the films, fine control over the materials’ structure, and robustness of the products under ambient and physiological conditions. However the preparation of such films needs the assembly on a substrate and, sometimes, cannot be detached from it, which has limited the appli- cation of such films in areas as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM).Thus, the production of free-standing films is of extreme importance once it allows the direct experimental determi- nation of many physical properties of fundamental significance such as ion permeation and mechanical properties that can be tuned for real-world applications. In this work, we investigated the elaboration of free-standing multilayer films made of chitosan (CHI) and alginate (ALG), by detaching a polyelectrolyte multilayer film from its under- lying substrate without any postprocessing step. The conditions for optimized film growth were investigated. The adhesion of C2C12 myoblast cells on the CHI/ALG membrane was assessed by cytoskele- tal and nuclear staining. A good cell adhesion and spreading was observed all over the surface. The results demonstrate the potential of such biocompatible free standing membranes made of CHI and ALG for applications in TERM

Determination of structural parameters characterizing thin films by optical methods: A comparison between scanning angle reflectometry and optical waveguide lightmode spectroscopy

International audienceWe present a comparative study of the structural parameters characterizing thin macromolecular adsorbed films that are obtained from two optical techniques: optical waveguide lightmode spectroscopy ͑OWLS͒ and scanning angle reflectometry ͑SAR͒. We use polyelectrolyte multilayers and polyelectrolyte multilayers/protein films to perform this study. The comparison between the information obtained with the two methods is possible because the buildup of the polyelectrolyte multilayers is known to become substrate independent after the deposition of the first few polyelectrolyte layers. The analysis of the optical data requires usually to postulate a refractive index profile for the interface. Two profiles have been used: the homogeneous and isotropic monolayer and the bilayer profiles. When the refractive index profile of an adsorbed film is well approximated by a homogeneous and isotropic monolayer, as shown by using an analysis of the deposited films in terms of optical invariants, the two optical techniques lead to similar values for the film thickness and the optical mass. The situation is more complex in the case of the multilayers/protein films for which the calculated parameters can strongly depend upon the refractive index profile that is postulated to analyze the optical data. Whereas the optical mass and, to a lesser extent, the thickness seem fairly model independent for OWLS, they appear to be extremely sensitive to the model for SAR. For proteins deposited on top of the polyelectrolyte film, optical mass and protein thickness were found to be comparable when determined by OWLS and by SAR using the bilayer model. The data analysis of the SAR curves with the monolayer model leads to much larger and even physically unreasonable film thicknesses and optical masses. This was particularly noticeable for proteins having a large size ͑human serum albumin and fibrinogen͒, whereas both models lead to similar results for small sized proteins. By means of the different refractive index profiles, we show that great care must be taken in the physicochemical interpretation of the structural parameters determined by these optical techniques

Impacts of Integrated Management System in Dornier Technology Inc

The integrated management system (IMS) has received a lot of attention as a tool for managing organizational activities, particularly in approved maintenance organizations (AMOs). The purpose of this study is to look into the impact of implementing an IMS in Dornier Technology Inc. The study takes a quantitative approach which are collecting data. The study’s findings indicate the implementing an IMS has favorable impact on the AMO. The IMS deployment improved efficiency and efficacy of the AMO’s procedures, as well as increasing employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the IMS deployment allowed the AMO to meet regulatory criteria while also improving safety performance. Another study’s finding that implementing an IMS has challenges like merging policies, procedures, and processes, difficulty in integrating different systems

A New Land Surface Hydrology within the Noah-WRF Land-Atmosphere Mesoscale Model Applied to Semiarid Environment: Evaluation over the Dantiandou Kori (Niger)

Land-atmosphere feedbacks, which are particularly important over the Sahel during the West African Monsoon (WAM), partly depend on a large range of processes linked to the land surface hydrology and the vegetation heterogeneities. This study focuses on the evaluation of a new land surface hydrology within the Noah-WRF land-atmosphere-coupled mesoscale model over the Sahel. This new hydrology explicitly takes account for the Dunne runoff using topographic information, the Horton runoff using a Green-Ampt approximation, and land surface heterogeneities. The previous and new versions of Noah-WRF are compared against a unique observation dataset located over the Dantiandou Kori (Niger). This dataset includes dense rain gauge network, surfaces temperatures estimated from MSG/SEVIRI data, surface soil moisture mapping based on ASAR/ENVISAT C-band radar data and in situ observations of surface atmospheric and land surface energy budget variables. Generally, the WAM is reasonably reproduced by Noah-WRF even if some limitations appear throughout the comparison between simulations and observations. An appreciable improvement of the model results is also found when the new hydrology is used. This fact seems to emphasize the relative importance of the representation of the land surface hydrological processes on the WAM simulated by Noah-WRF over the Sahel