Analyzing the Turkish insurance companies’ financial performance traded on BIST implementing the critic-based PIV method

Risk management is one of the prominent issues which are pivotal to the success of a business and may adversely affect profitability if not properly practised. Therefore, the main objective of this paper was to determine risk management practices in manufacturing SMEs in Cape Town. The research conducted was quantitative in nature and constituted the collection of data from 74 SME leaders, all of whom had to adhere to a list of strict delineation criteria. All data collected were thoroughly analyzed through means of descriptive statistics. From the findings made, it is clear that SMEs in the manufacturing sector do in fact understand risk management initiatives applicable to ‘manage’ their respective businesses towards sustainability, but not to a large extent. It was found that respondents are unaware of the elements which make risk management effective, which ultimately aids to the development of problems for SMEs. All employees, managers and owners must coordinate their efforts together to identify and manage organizational risks within their ambit to obtain total risk coverage, as well as provide assurance that these risks are effectively managed from a coordinated approach. Further studies may be carried out to identify measures that can be taken to improve the effectiveness of risk management practices in SMEs.

Investments are among the most important factors of national economic growth. Selection of optimal investment project is the first priority for any enterprise with limited financial resources. This study is dedicated to a choice among mutually exclusive projects, which are impossible to complete partially, so, one project must be chosen and all others must be rejected. An investor must find among all possible projects the one that allows to better achieve all investor’s aims. A mathematical model of multi-purpose multi-criteria investor decision making is proposed for investment project selection problem. Efficiency and riskiness of studied projects are evaluated using such indicators as profit, rate of return, payback period, marginal cost of capital, also taking into account subjective characteristics, namely the investor’s attitude towards financial risks, importance assessment of decision making criteria, etc. Decision making assessment methods for the situations of risk and uncertainty are applied to resolve the problem of optimal project selection, such as Wald’s pessimistic criterion, maximax optimistic criterion, as well as Hurwicz’s, Laplace’s, Bayes- Laplace, Hodges-Lehmann criteria, and Savage’s minimax risk criterion. Calculations carried out and results obtained indicate that the best investment project chosen that way will provide the highest absolute profit, despite certain disadvantages such as lower rate of return, longer payback period and higher risk than other projects.

This paper examines the market value added (MVA) of listed companies in Thailand. It is known that the major drawbacks of MVA are size and market return effects. Using the two additional approaches to improve MVA study – MVA change, and the market return adjusted of three-year growth rate of MVA – the better interpretations of MVA in the Thai market during 1999–2018 are obtained. The first approach reduces the market capitalization bias, while the second diminishes the effect of the overall market trend and the stability of firm’s current performance. This study finds that when the two alternative techniques are applied, the annual results of the MVA rankings are not consistent with those of the traditional MVA and thus lead to a new insight into such indicator. Therefore, this study advances the understanding of the market value added and value creation indicators.