FOREWORD

Financial Statement Analysis (FSA), published annually by the Bank of Korea since 1960, describes the details of the business performance and financial conditions of Korean corporations.


   This edition covers Korean corporations' balance sheets, income statements, and statements of cash flows, as well as key indicators concerning their financial stability, profitability and growth for 2009, classified by industry. Small-scale companies in terms of turnover are included in the population, as in the previous year, to provide a more comprehensive grasp of corporations' performance. 

   For the convenience of users, the full text of this edition and related data files are also available on the Bank of Korea's Economic Statistics System website (ECOS, http://ecos.bok.or.kr).  


   Meanwhile, as the accounting environment is expected to change significantly due to the introduction in Korea of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) from next year, the Bank of Korea will work to improve the current system of financial statement analysis statistics. In this regard, comments and suggestions from users will be greatly welcomed.
 

   We hope that this book will be helpful to companies in framing their business strategies, to the government sector in drawing up economic policies, and to financial institutions in assessing credit risk. Finally, we wish to express our sincere appreciation to all the corporations surveyed and to those institutions whose efforts have helped to make this work possible.

                               July 2010

                                                Myung Kee Kim  
                                                            Director General 
                                                                            Economic Statistics           
                                                                         Dept. The Bank of Korea