ERICA WG has published its document: "European non-financial listed groups: Analysis of 2019 data"

The study presents some highlights of European non-financial listed groups, on profitability and financial structure in 2019, as well as financial debt structure and cost of debt. One of the main findings of the study is that the deterioration in operating results and profitability, that started in 2018, continued in 2019. The first application of the new accounting standard for leases – called IFRS 16 – resulted in poorer solvency and higher net indebtedness but did not stop the downward trend in the cost of financial debt. An exceptional additional chapter is devoted to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis on the financial performance and structure of European non-financial listed groups during the first half of 2020. Unsurprisingly, 2020 half-year figures demonstrate that the Covid-19 crisis seriously affects their profitability and solvency.

ERICA (European Records of IFRS Consolidated Accounts), is a database, for internal use within the members of ECCBSO, composed of a dataset of around 1,000 European non-financial groups, fully representative of the stock markets of the countries participating in the project (Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Turkey). The data are obtained from publicly available financial statements, having been treated manually, by CBSO statistics and accounting specialists, to be fitted on a standard European format (ERICA format). This manual treatment means, in some cases, the interpretation of the original data, a constraint that readers of this document should bear in mind.

The ERICA WG has published a new “ERICA series” document: "IFRS 16 Leases - Expected Impact"

IFRS 16 Leases represents the biggest change to lease accounting in over 30 years. The goal of this analysis is to ascertain ex ante the impact of IFRS 16 on the ERICA dataset and give detailed insight into this. The main impacts are expected to be an increase in financial liabilities and an increase in EBITDA.

The ERICA WG has published a new “ERICA series” document: "The risk-return paradox after IFRS adoption by European listed groups"

This analysis tests the existence of the risk-return paradox in European listed non-financial groups after adoption of the IFRS and addresses its drivers using an up-to-date approach: cluster analysis. The risk-return paradox implies a negative association between corporate returns and risk. The results reveal that the higher-risk cluster tends to perform worse, while the lower-risk cluster performs better.

ERICA WG has published its document: "European non-financial listed groups: Analysis of 2018 data"

The study presents some highlights of European non-financial listed groups, on profitability and financial structure in 2018, as well as financial debt structure and cost of debt. ERICA (European Records of IFRS Consolidated Accounts), is a database, for internal use within the members of ECCBSO, composed of a dataset of around 1,000 European non-financial groups, fully representative of the stock markets of the countries participating in the project (Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Turkey). The data are obtained from publicly available financial statements, having been treated manually, by CBSO statistics and accounting specialists, to be fitted on a standard European format (ERICA format). This manual treatment means, in some cases, the interpretation of the original data, a constraint that readers of this document should bear in mind.

The ERICA WG has published a new “ERICA series” document: “Employment and relative labour costs”. This document examines the distribution of group-level labour costs in different countries, based on consolidated data from non-financial listed groups, gathered in the ERICA database for the accounting period 2017. A cross-country comparison for the globalized labour costs per full-time equivalent (FTE) was made by decomposing the differences between countries into intrinsic and structural components, in order to understand whether the difference between country ratios is mainly due to differences in the real labour cost per FTE or to differences in the structure of the countries’ group population.

FSA WG has worked on different tools for better visualization of the outcomes. Infographic report for interest coverage ratio presents the percentage of number and debt for weak, vulnerable and resilient firms between the years 2000 and 2017.

Link to the FSA WG publication section

"The FSA WG has produced this News release that presents the most recent trends in the financing cost of European non-financial corporations (Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Turkey). This note covers the period 2000-2017."

Link to the FSA WG publication section

ERICA WG has published its document: "European non-financial listed groups: Analysis of 2017 data" together with its annex "European non-financial listed groups: Analysis of 2017 data - Annexes"

The study presents some highlights of European non-financial listed groups, on profitability and financial structure in 2017, as well as financial debt structure and cost of debt. ERICA (European Records of IFRS Consolidated Accounts), is a database, for internal use within the members of ECCBSO, composed of a dataset of around 1,000 European non-financial groups, fully representative of the stock markets of the countries participating in the project (Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal and Spain). The data are obtained from publicly available financial statements, having been treated manually, by CBSO statistics and accounting specialists, to be fitted on a standard European format (ERICA format); this manual treatment means, in some cases, the interpretation of the original data, a constraint that readers of this document should bear in mind

“Outlook #6 “High profitability activities a review on the concepts of profitability”

The Outlook #6 available free of charge at the BACH website, entitled "High profitability activities a review on the concepts of profitability”, uses BACH data from 11 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia) to analyse European non-financial activities’ profitability. This outlook focuses on identifying the activities with high return on equity and knowing their distribution by country and sector. Furthermore, other concepts of profitability are analysed, such as return on assets and the net operating margin. The comparison of the high profitability activities according to each one of the profitability ratios highlights the factors that favour profitability across countries and economic sectors."

"The FSA WG has produced a user friendly excel tool that helps to explore and navigate through its Financing Cost data base of non-financial corporations.”

Link to the FSA WG publication section