GROUP WORK

Order Description

You are required to use TWO companies (Acer Company and Kellogg’s Company). These are companies that are listed either on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ – two of America’s top bourses. You must extract quarterly data on Turnover (Revenue or Sales), Operating Profit (Profit before interest and tax) and Net Profit after Tax from the third quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2014. This should give you 20 data points.

Required:
(a) Perform a time series analysis to identify its components which are the Random, Cyclical, Seasonal and Trend (12 marks)
(b) Provide comments on the components of the time series and discuss the extent to which the results of the time series help to understand what significantly affect the sales, operating profit and net profit figures. You must relate to the company’s business operations (2.5 marks)
(c) Perform regression analysis and use it for forecast the Revenue, operating profit and net profit figures for the third quarter of 2014. (6 marks)
(d) Compare forecasted figures with the actual outturn for the third quarter of 2014. Provide an explanation to the size of the difference between the forecast and the actual figure. (2.5 marks)
(e) Referencing will be awarded 2 marks

The above should be done in report which should be in MS Word format (Times New Roman font size 12, single-spaced). All figures and tables should be clearly labelled and embedded within the body of the report as MS Excel objects. DO NOT SUBMIT SEPARATE EXCEL FILES.

You must include a comprehensive list of references for both your data sources as well as citations. You are highly recommended to use the Harvard academic referencing style.