Kresge Research Guides: STRATEGY 302 Business Strategy : Airlines: Industry & Company Performance Analysis

Analyzing the Airline Industry

US DOT Airline Quarterly Financial Review
Department of Transportation quarterly analysis of the financial condition of US major airlines, including JetBlue, Southwest and other budget carriers.
Airline Industry Handbook
Investopedia's Industry Handbook on the airline industry offers a glossary of airline business terms, peformance measures and a Five Forces Analysis.
MIT - Airline Industry Overview
MIT's Global Airline Industry Program is focused on the economics and operations of the global commercial airline industry, through research reports, the Airline Data Project and Industry Consortium.

Finding business and industry ratios

D&B Hoovers
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D&B Hoovers has public and private company profiles for US and global companies. Profiles include company descriptions and history, financials and ratios, hierarchy/corporate family tree data, SWOT analysis, news, competitors, SIC industry codes, NAICS industry codes, SEC filings, and annual reports. The “Build a List” function allows users to create a company list based on numerous parameters
and filters. Industry content includes constituents and analysis that include RMA Industry Norms, MarketLine Industry Profiles, and Fredonia Focus reports.
Technical notes: Company lists downloads are limited to 100 records. If you encounter a login screen, all seats are in use. Try connecting using the “UM users” link or at a later time.

Technical note:If you encounter a login screen, all seats are in use. Try connecting at a later time. Subscription includes 25 seats which are shared across all 3 UM campuses.
Mergent Online
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Current and historical (past 15 years) firm descriptions, statistics, financial information and ratios, annual reports, mergers, acquisitions, disposals, joint ventures, long-term debt, bond ratings, capital stock, insider trading and supply chain for US and foreign companies. Mergent Online also provides access to Investext analyst reports.
Help guide

Technical notes: Company reports and financials can be exported to Excel.
Help guide

Yahoo! Finance Industry Center
The Yahoo! Finance Industry Center is a free resource that has some excellent industry information, including performance ratios. The Industry Browser allows you to browse industries by performance rankings, including ROE, P/E ratio, market cap, price change, price to book value, profit margin, price to book value, long term debt, and more.

Resources for analyzing companies and industry

Performance ratios

Industry and company financial ratios help compare a company against other companies in an industry, or generally measure financial performance. Industry ratios are an aggregate measure of performance, often broken down by company size.

Business Ratios and Formulas: A Comprehensive guide (ebook)
An ideal tool for measuring corporate performance, this authoritative resource allows managers and auditors to pick and choose the tools they need to best assess their organization's performance. Each formula includes a complete description, explanation of the calculation, an example, and cautions regarding its use. The cautions are of particular use, since they describe those elements of a measurement that can be modified to deliver misleading results, different measurements that may work better in certain situations, usage on a trend line basis, and which other measurements should be used to reinforce indicated results.
16 Financial Ratios for Analyzing a Company’s Strengths and Weaknesses
From the The American Association of Individual Investors, a quick guide to company performance ratios
Financial Ratio Analysis

SWOT and other strategy analyses

How to do a SWOT analysis

Good overview document also includes a nice set of tools from the Rapid BI site

BPM: A Rigorous Approach

A slideshow that outlines the approach to building process foundations for a process-based organization
Offers examples of use and a case study outline

Application of a Quantification SWOT analytical method

Force Field Analysis

Kurt Lewin's Force Field Analysis: Decision Making Made Easy

PEST Analysis