MORRISON FINANCIAL ANALYSIS

Morrison Financial analysis

Morrison Financial Analysis

Introduction

Morrison (Wm.) Supermarkets is engaged in the grocery retailing in the United Kingdom. Through its subsidiaries, Co.'s business activities involve the manufacture and distribution of fresh food products including vegetables; captive insurer; fresh meat processor; product packaging and wholesaler; bakery operations; property development; property investment; and grocery retailing. As of Jan 30 2011, Co. had a total of 439 stores across the United Kingdom.

Wm Morrison Supermarkets (Morrison) is one of the "Big Four" grocery retailer supermarket chains in the UK. As of January 2009, the company is primarily engaged in the operation of over 382 stores and 287 petrol filling stations across the UK. The company provides a range of low-price and special offers on grocery, fresh foods and alcoholic products.

William Morrison opened his egg and butter stall in Bradford Market in 1899. This marked the start of what would become a one of the United Kingdom's favorite grocery stores. A small shop opened in 1958 that was the first in the city to offer self-service. The Victoria, the company's first supermarket, opened in 1961. Morrison became a public company in 1967. The company continued to expand and opened more Morrison's store all over the United Kingdom. Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC uses a simple strategy. Its goal is to provide fresh food at a good value. Part of its ability to achieve this goal is that it manufactures food when it can and sources locally. There are nearly 500 stores in the United Kingdom. The retail website offers information on suppliers that are used in the area of the stores. The Market Street sections of the stores feature a butcher, fishmonger, bakery, delicatessen, cake shop and other options. There are also recipes, meal ideas and healthy eating tips available on the website. There are 9 million Morrison's customers every week that are served by the 132,000 employees of the company. It is the fourth largest retailer in the United Kingdom.

Limitations of information gathering

The main limitation of information gathering is that 100% accuracy cannot be guaranteed. There is a small chance that some information gathered are inaccurate or that the source is unreliable. The chance of this occurring is however insignificant. By and large information obtained may be considered to be significantly accurate (Vincent, 2002,432).

Another limitation of information gathering can be information overload. With the advent of the internet so much information is available online. This presents many authors with the challenge of sifting through the vast information available and extracting only the ones that are relevant and useful to the subject of the research project (Linda, 2008,23).

Finally, information available are substantially historical in nature, hence some situations may have been overtaken by events. One of the financial measurements that will be evaluated in the course of this research project is the trend analysis. This measurement is useful in projecting the future outlook of a business, in some cases past trends are not a good indicator of future performance for various economic or business ...