Business performance assessment of small and medium-sized enterprises: Evidence from the Czech Republic

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Business performance assessment is one of the basic tasks of management. Business performance can be assessed using a number of methods. The basic ones include financial analysis, Balanced Scorecard or Economic Value Added (EVA). The paper is focused on SME business performance assessment based on Economic Value Added, calculated using the INFA build-up model. According to this method, companies were divided into four categories. The first category included companies with a positive EVA value. The second category included companies with negative EVA, but with the economic result above the risk-free rate. The third category included companies with a positive economic result above the risk-free rate. The fourth category included companies with a negative economic result. The model did not include companies with negative equity. The input represented 15 predictors based on their financial statements. The data were normalized and all extreme values, likely caused by a data rewriting error, were removed. Company performance is visualized by comparing Principal Component Analysis and Kohonen neural networks. Compared to similar research, the methods are compared using the data that analyzes the performance of companies. Both methods made it possible to visualize the given task. With regard to the purpose of facilitating the interpretation of the results, for the given case, the use of PC seems to be more appropriate.

Acknowledgment
This study has been supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic under project No TL01000349.

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    • Figure 1. Principle of the PCA method
    • Figure 2. One-dimensional space
    • Figure 3. Kohonen network
    • Figure 4. Importance of individual components
    • Figure 5. Individual parts involved in a component
    • Figure 6. Position of companies in 2-dimensional space
    • Figure 7. Mutual dependence of the individual predictors
    • Figure 8. Position of the companies and Kohonen neural networks
    • Table 1. Company size coding
    • Table 2. Number of companies in original and modified data set
    • Conceptualization
      Vojtech Stehel, Jakub Horak
    • Funding acquisition
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Investigation
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Methodology
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Project administration
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Software
      Vojtech Stehel, Tomas Krulicky
    • Supervision
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Validation
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Visualization
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Writing – review & editing
      Vojtech Stehel
    • Writing – original draft
      Vojtech Stehel, Jakub Horak
    • Data curation
      Jakub Horak, Tomas Krulicky
    • Formal Analysis
      Jakub Horak, Tomas Krulicky
    • Resources
      Jakub Horak