FOREWORD
The Financial Statement Analysis (FSA), published annually by the Bank of Korea since 1960 in accordance with the provisions of Article 86 of the Bank of Korea Act, provides public details regarding the business performances and financial conditions of Korean corporations.
This edition covers the financial statement analysis report, the concepts of and methods for calculating the major financial ratios, and the financial statements of Korean corporations classified by industry. For cross-country comparability, the major financial ratios of advanced countries, such as the U.S., Japan and Germany, are included. For user convenience, the full text of this book and the related data files are also available on the Bank of Korea’s Economic Statistics System website (ecos.bok.or.kr).
The Bank of Korea is devoting its best efforts to the qualitative improvement of its economic statistics. In 2011 the FSA statistics were changed to aggregate statistics, using financial statements submitted to the National Tax Service for corporate tax returns. This improvement has reduced the estimation errors from the sampling methods previously used, relieved companies’ survey response burdens, reduced survey costs, and boosted the accuracy of corporate financial results and positions in Korea. This year, the Bank of Korea has also made efforts to provide information related to the distribution of our FSA indicators not appearing in the aggregate financial statement by developing and releasing quartile statistics.
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 of the cooperating institutions whose efforts have helped to make this work possible.
November 2015
Jeon, Seung-Cheol
Director General
Economic Statistics Dept.
The Bank of Korea