双语:Schumpeter: The Fog of War
发布时间:2018年03月09日
发布人:nanyuzi  

Schumpeter: The Fog of War

熊彼特:战争迷雾

 

If they are to save the firm, General Electric’s bosses and board need far better information

通用电气的高管和董事会若想拯救这家公司,需要大大提高信息的质量。

 

In their documentary “The Vietnam War”, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the directors, dwell on the flawed information that American politicians got from Indo-China. The generals on the ground focused on the “kill ratio”, or the number of enemies killed per American or South Vietnamese soldiers killed. That bore no relationship to victory – North Vietnam quickly replaced its dead soldiers. And it corrupted behaviour, leading American troops to embellish numbers and count dead civilians as “wins”.

 

肯·伯恩斯(Ken Burns)和林恩·诺维克(Lynn Novick)在他们执导的纪录片《越南战争》(The Vietnam War)中详述了美国政客从印度支那获取的情报有多不可靠。前线的美军将领一味强调“杀敌比率”,即每个美国士兵的杀敌数量,或南越士兵的杀敌数量。这与胜利并无关联——北越很快就补充了士兵。这也将人们引入歧途,美军开始美化数字,将死亡的平民也算作“胜利”。

 

The curse of rotten information can strike companies, too. That seems to be the case with General Electric (GE), which has had a vertiginous fall. Its shares, cashflow and forecast profits have dropped by about 50% since 2015. On January 16th it disclosed a huge, $15bn capital shortfall at its financial arm due to a revision in insurance reserves. And on January 24th it revealed a $10bn loss for the fourth quarter. In its core industrial arm, returns on capital have sunk from 20% in 2007 to a puny 5% in 2017.

 

糟糕的情报这一祸根也会在企业中埋下。惨遭重大滑坡的通用电气(GE)似乎便属于这种情况。自2015年以来,其股价、现金流和利润预期已下跌了约50%。上月16日,GE透露其金融部门因保险业务储备金方面的调整而出现150亿美元的巨大资本缺口。24日,公司公布第四季度亏损100亿美元。其核心工业部门的资本回报率从2007年的20%缩水至2017年惨淡的5%。

 

GE’s boss, John Flannery, an insider who took office in August, must clear up the mess made by his predecessor, Jeff Immelt. He seems to recognise the gravity of the situation. In November he gave a frank presentation to investors. Last month he suggested that GE might be broken up. Yet an unnerving sense lingers that no one fully understands what has gone wrong.

 

GE的老板约翰·弗兰纳里(John Flannery)从公司内部一路成长起来,于去年8月走马上任。他必须清理前任掌门人杰夫·伊梅尔特(Jeff Immelt)留下的烂摊子。他似乎也认识到了局势的严峻。11月,他向投资者做了坦诚的报告。上月,他暗示GE也许会分拆。不过,一种让人不踏实的感觉仍挥之不去:恐怕没人完全明白GE到底是哪里出了问题。

 

Is the conglomerate formerly known as the world’s best-run firm a victim of weak demand for gas turbines, a low oil price, lavish digital initiatives, timing lags in client payments, morbidity rates, bad deals, cost overruns or a 20-year squeeze in industrial-equipment margins because of Chinese competition? You can imagine GE’s 12-man board blinking at this list, like Pentagon generals huddled around maps of the Gulf of Tonkin which they are too embarrassed to admit they do not understand.

 

这家曾列全球运营最佳的企业集团何以落入困境?是因为燃气轮机需求疲软吗?油价低?数字项目烧钱?客户延迟付款?患病率影响?糟糕的并购交易?成本超支?还是因为来自中国的竞争在过去20年里持续挤压工业设备利润?想象得出GE的12人董事会正盯着这些选项茫然地眨着眼睛,就像五角大楼里的将军们聚集在北部湾地图的周围,人人都不好意思承认自己其实一头雾水。

 

Schumpeter’s theory is that GE’s flow of financial information has become fantastically muddled. There is lots of it about (some 200 pages are released each quarter) and it is audited by KPMG. But it offers volume and ambiguity instead of brevity and clarity. It is impossible – certainly for outsiders, probably for the board, and possibly for Mr. Flannery – to answer central questions. How much cashflow does GE sustainably make and where? How much capital does it employ and where? What liabilities must be serviced before shareholders get their profits?

 

本专栏认为,GE的财务信息已变得极其混乱。GE披露了大量财务信息(每个季度公布的信息多达二百来页),又有毕马威来做审计,但这些信息庞杂而含混,欠缺简洁和明晰。靠这些信息无法回答那些关键问题:GE持续获得的自由现金流有多少,来自哪里?它动用了多少资本,资本流向了哪里?在股东们获得收益之前,GE须先偿还哪些债务?公司以外的人士肯定无法回答,董事会很可能也一样,弗兰纳里说不定也是如此。

 

Perhaps GE has a better, parallel accounting system that it keeps under wraps. But the public one reveals eight problems. First, it has no consistent measure of performance. This year it has used 18 definitions of group profits and cashflow. As of September 2017, the highest number was double the average one. There is a large gap between most measures of profits and free cashflow.

 

也许GE有一个更好的、未公之于众的平行会计系统,但其公开的系统暴露出八个问题。首先,GE缺少衡量绩效的一致标准。今年,它采用了18个定义来衡量集团的利润和现金流。截至2017年9月,最高数字比平均数字高出一倍。大部分利润及自由现金流衡量结果之间都存在巨大差异。

 

Second, GE’s seven operating divisions (power, for example, or aviation) are allowed to use a flattering definition of profit that excludes billions of dollars of supposedly one-off costs. Their total profits are almost twice as big as the firm’s. It is the corporate equivalent of China’s GDP accounting, where the claimed outputs of each province add up to more than the national figure.

 

第二,GE的七大业务部门(例如电力或航空)被容许使用一个会让结果比较好看的利润定义,将数十亿美元的所谓一次性成本刨除在外。这些部门的总利润几乎是公司利润的两倍。这相当于将中国的GDP统计方法运用在了企业上:中国各省声称的产值相加后高于全国数字。

 

Third, GE does not assess itself on a geographical basis. Does China yield solid returns on capital? Has Saudi Arabia been a good bet? No one seems to know. This is unhelpful, given that the firm does half its business abroad and that the long-term decline in returns has taken place as the firm has become more global.

 

第三,GE没有按照区域来评估自身。公司是否从中国获得了丰厚的资本回报?对沙特阿拉伯的押注对不对?答案似乎无人知晓。公司一半的业务都是在海外开展,然而随着公司全球化程度加深,回报率却长期下滑,有鉴于此,这种无知对公司实在无益。

 

Fourth, GE pays little attention to the total capital it employs, which has ballooned by about 50% over the past decade (excluding its financial arm). Its managers rarely talk about it and have set no targets. It is unclear which parts of the firm soak up disproportionate resources relative to profits, diluting returns.

 

第四,GE几乎不关心自己投入的资本总量。过去十年间,这些资本已激增约50%(不包括其金融部门)。其管理者很少谈论资本问题,也未为之设立目标。无法确知公司的哪些部门耗费了与其收益不相称的资源,导致收益被稀释。

 

Fifth, it is hard to know if GE’s leverage is sustainable. Its net debts are 2.6 times its gross operating profits, again excluding its financial arm. That is high relative to its peers – for Siemens and Honeywell the ratio is about one. Some of those profits are paper gains. And the average level of debt during the year is much higher than the figures reported at the end of each quarter.

 

第五,很难说GE的杠杆水平是否可持续。其净债务是其经营毛利的2.6倍——同样不包括它的金融部门。这个比率相对同类企业来说较高:西门子和霍尼韦尔的数字大约是1。GE的部分经营毛利是账面收益。而且,这一年间的平均债务水平比每季度末公布的数字高出许多。

 

Sixth, the strength of GE’s financial arm is unclear. The new insurance loss will lower its tangible equity to 8% of assets. This is well below the comfort level, although regulators seem to have granted it forbearance in order gradually to rebuild its capital.

 

第六,GE的金融部门实力如何也无从知晓。由于新近保险业务的亏损,GE的有形股本将降至其资产的8%。这远远低于令人安心的水平,不过监管部门似乎给予了GE一些宽限,好让它逐渐重建资本。

 

Seventh, it is hard to calibrate the risk this poses to GE shareholders. GE likes to hint that its industrial and financial arms are run separately. But they are umbilically connected by a mesh of cross-guarantees, factoring arrangements and other transactions.

 

第七,很难评估这对GE的股东构成了怎样的风险。GE很喜欢暗示其工业和金融部门的运营彼此独立。但一系列交叉担保、应收账款保理协议以及其他交易将它们紧密联系在一起。

 

Eighth, is GE sure that its industrial balance-sheet accurately measures its capital employed and its liabilities? Some 46% of assets are intangible, which are hard to pin down financially: for example, goodwill and “contract” assets where GE has booked profits but not been paid yet. Hefty liabilities, including pensions and tax, are also tricky to calculate. Based on GE’s poor record of forecasting, it seems that large write-downs are possible. On January 24th GE said that regulators were looking into its accounting.

 

第八,GE是否能肯定其工业资产负债表精确记录了公司投入的资本及承担的债务?GE无形资产的占比约为46%,很难确定这类资产的价值——公司商誉及“合约资产”(GE将之登记为利润,但尚未收到付款)便属于此类。包含养老金及税在内的高昂债务同样难以估算。GE的预测水准历来欠佳,就这一点来看,有可能发生大规模的资产减记。上月24日GE表示正在接受监管部门对其财报的调查。

 

GE’s situation is like that of the global bank conglomerates after the financial crisis. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC did not entirely trust their own numbers and lacked a framework for assessing which bits of their sprawl created value for shareholders. Today, after much toil, the people running these firms know whether, say, loans in California or trading in India make sense.

 

GE的情形与金融危机后那些全球银行集团的境况相似。花旗、摩根大通和汇丰并不完全相信自己的数字,也缺乏一个框架来评估自己庞杂的业务中有哪些为股东创造了价值。下了一番苦功后,如今这些银行集团的高管们已经清楚在加州放贷或在印度开展业务的做法是否明智。

 

This does not happen naturally. If neglected, financial reporting becomes a hostage to internal politics, with different constituencies claiming they bring in sales, while arguing that costs and capital are someone else’s problem. Mr. Flannery is a numbers guy who wants to slim GE to its profitable essence. But he is trapped in a financial construct that makes it hard to pursue that mission intelligently. Until he re-engineers how GE measures itself, he will be stumbling about in the murk.

 

这一切并不是自然而然发生的。如果不多加重视,财务报表就会受制于内部纷争,局面就是各方纷纷声称是自己贡献了销售额,同时辩称成本和资本是别人的问题。弗兰纳里是一个注重数字的人,他想令GE瘦身,只保留能够盈利的业务。但由于GE财务体系的牵绊,他要巧妙地完成这一任务困难重重。他需要改造GE衡量自身业绩的方法,否则他只能在黑暗中踉跄前行。


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