Relationship of Working Capital with Liquidity, Profitability and Solvency: A Case Study of ACC Limited

Abstract

Experts say that the goal of working capital management should be to enable a firm to maximize profits of its operations while meeting both short term debt and upcoming operational expenses, i.e. to preserve liquidity. But increasing profitability would tend to reduce firms’ liquidity and too much attention on liquidity would tend to affect the profitability. No doubt, every firm tries to maximize the profitability by preserving the liquidity. However, increasing profits at the cost of liquidity might cause serious trouble to the firm and this problem might lead to financial insolvency as well. Thus an effective WCM would be needed to strike a balance between the two core objectives of the firm. It is essential that the firm’s liquidity should be properly balanced. Because, excessive liquidity on one hand indicates the accumulation of idle funds that don’t fetch any profits for the firm and on the other hand, insufficient liquidity might damage the firm’s goodwill, deteriorate firm’s credit standings and that might lead to forced liquidation of firm’s assets. Afterwards problems like bankruptcy and insolvency might happen. To sum up, a company unable to make profits might be termed as a sick company but, a company having no liquidity might cease to exist. But when a company like Wal-Mart, is able to generate profit and maximise shareholder’s wealth with negative working capital, can we say that the company is on the verge of bankruptcy or is it a sign of managerial efficiency? Same is the case with ACC Limited, which is the company of our study. This paper attempts to study the association of working capital with liquidity, profitability and risk of bankruptcy of ACC Ltd. for the period 2000-01 to 2009-10. The study found that even with having negative working capital in most of the times, the company was able to earn a good rate of return because of its aggressive working capital policy but its solvency was ultimately at a stake.

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