FOREWORD
The Bank of Korea is pleased to release the 2017 edition of its Financial Statement Analysis (FSA), published annually since 1960 to provide research on and analysis of the business performances and financial conditions of Korean corporations.
This edition contains the financial statement analysis report for Korean corporations during 2017, the concepts of and methods for calculating their major financial ratios, their financial statements and major indicators, all classified by industry and by company size. In addition, quartile statistics for frequently used major indicators are also released. To facilitate cross-country comparison, the major financial ratios of advanced countries such as the U.S., Japan and Germany are included as well.
Starting from the 2017 analysis, a new industrial classification system has been adopted to reflect the 10th Korean Standard Industrial Classification and changes in the industrial structure. In addition, to maintain the continuity of the time series, the previously released statistics for 2015 and 2016 have been recompiled by retroactively applying the new classification system.
For user convenience, the full text of this book is available on the Bank of Korea’s website (www.bok.or.kr) and its Economic Statistics System website (ECOS, http://ecos.bok.or.kr). Furthermore, the related data files can be found at the ECOS website, and major indicators are also available on the mobile version of the ECOS website (http://ecos.bok.or.kr/mobile).
We hope that this book will be helpful to the government sector in drawing up its economic policies, to companies in framing their business strategies, to financial institutions in assessing their credit risks, and to members of academia in their research. Finally, we wish to express our sincere appreciation to all of the cooperating institutions whose efforts have helped to make this work possible.
November 2018
Park, Yang Su
Director General
Economic Statistics Dept.
The Bank of Korea