A focus of Chris's teaching is the way in which we use accounting data to describe firms in economic terms. Chris has written over 25 case studies. Here is a selection from his current suite.

Amazon
This case looks at Amazon's performance in the years up to 2000, and in the years since. In 2000, Amazon disclosed fantastic sales growth, but was racking up enormous losses in the process. What sort of financial analysis could we do that would permit us to invest in a business like that?

Apple
Apple has become one of the world's most admired companies through its design brilliance, the quality of the user experience, and the influence of its technology on the world. Any innovative technology business has to expect more failures than successes. In the end, Apple’s survival needed the lighter-than-air balance sheet model pioneered by Michael Dell. An additional challenge for Apple was its ‘closed architecture’ which meant it had to bear most of its research and promotion costs itself. Apple struggled in its early decades to achieve the revenues needed to leverage the high cost base this implied. The breakthrough came from its music and communication products, rather than computers, and not until the mid 2000s. The case shows how a firm’s strategy, its business model and its competitive environment interrelate with its financial performance. In the body of the case we focus on the personalities and on Apple's financial performance. There is a parallel timeline at the end of the case containing a detailed history of products and personalities. We use Apple here as a worked example in financial storytelling, to develop the disciplines of profitability analysis.

Arsenal
The economics of football are relatively simple so football is a good study if we are learning accounting, and the first subject of this case study is how well do the financial statements of a football club describe what is going on? Football is a famously difficult business to make money in. Football revenues are burgeoning, but the money mostly finishes up in the pockets of the players. As a result, many of the world’s top football clubs lose money, and very few earn what would normally be considered a decent return for investors. Arsenal has been an exception. It had no choice – it was a public company listed on a stock market and lacked a rich owner with deep pockets. So the second subject of this case study is whether, and how, Arsenal managed to make money from football.

Queens Moat House
Queens Moat House Hotels grew very rapidly by acquisition in the late 1980s, only to collapse a few years later. The new management revealed that there had been large-scale false accounting, and the court agreed that conclusion. The first case charts the history of QMH. The second case (which is available upon request) assembles the materials we might have had at the time to ask whether financial analysis could reasonably have predicted that QMH would fail.

Vodafone
Vodafone has grown by acquisition to its current position as a global telecoms business. The case describes the Mannesmann acquisition in 2000 and tracks Vodafone's subsequent financial performance. This performance was blighted almost annually by very large write-offs of acquired goodwill and intangibles. The case raises the question whether achieving global dominance by acquisition is likely to be a game worth winning for shareholders. It also raises the question whether the accounting impairment rules reliably describe reality.

Young & Co's Brewery
Youngs is an excellent foundation case in the concept of accounting return on capital. Youngs was a family-controlled brewing and pub company that traces its roots back to the 16th century. It has a very high-quality portfolio of real estate in the form of pubs and, until recently, its brewery site. Youngs practice was to revalue this real estate on its balance sheet, and one consequence of this was that Youngs’ long-term reported return on capital was very low and apparently well below the cost of capital.