Financial Analysis of Chiquita Brands International
...g 40,476,381 shares of $.01 par value common stock. As of April 1, 2005 there were 1,355 holders of record of their common stock. Their stock price is currently $25.50 per share. Most recently Chiquita declared and paid a dividend of $.10 per share on April 15th, 2005. Their stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CQB. Chiquita had an increase in their total assets for 2004 of about 4.3 percent. Since 2003 they also managed to decrease the total liabilities by 1 percent. They also sold some more stock and increased their retained earnings for their stockholders by 44.5 percent. Their total stockholders equity went up also by about 10.8 percent. This shows that Chiquita is apparently looking good this year and more people want to invest in their company. On the income statement you can see that their sales are up for the year 17.5 percent. An increase in sales is always a positive thing on the income statement. Chiquita also shows a 17 percent increase in operating expenses, some of this is to be expected due to the increase in revenue. In addition, they also have an increase of 91 percent in interest income. Chiquita changed their method of accounting in 2004. In the end they ended up with 44.2 less net income than 2003. This seems very negative but if you look further you will see that most of the excess net income from the prior year was from the gains they had on the sale of some of their operations. One of the most important details is that they declared a dividend this year for the first time since they began their financial restructuring. Despite this, Chiquita’s rate of return on their net sales did drop almost 2 percent this year. Their assets turnover is a ratio of $1.73 to every dollar up from the previous year about $ .20. The return on assets is lower than the industry average of 6.9 percent. Finally they had a significant increase in cash totaling more than 8 million dollars for the year, some of this fr...