You're directing a third-grade production of The Cow That Mooed. You originally cast little Timmy as the cow. But he couldn't get the moo right. No matter how much you berated him, no matter how much you tried to tap into his buried reservoirs of emotion, he wouldn't commit to the moo in a way that resonated on a spiritual level. Mostly, he just cried in the corner.
Time to recast. Maybe Suzy can do it.
Take that concept to the financial world, and you've got an earnings recast. A company made a mistake the first time it reported its financial figures. So it has to change them. The figures get recast...just like Timmy.
A company reports a profit of $2 million for the second quarter of 2015. Some time passes. It's now 2018 and an accountant is re-reading some old financial documents (for fun, as accountants are wont to do). He discovers a decimal error. The company really only made $200,000 for the second quarter of 2015.
So the company has to change the numbers for the quarter...the quarter that ended three years before. It has to let investors and regulators know about the mistake and report the real figure.
The process is called an earnings recast, or an earnings restatement. It's usually bad news, but a failure to make the restatement once a problem is discovered can lead to regulatory investigations, which are usually worse news.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Earnings Quality?50 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is earnings quality Well it's just
math right Whatever Dot com just produced a dollar thirty
two in earnings One hundred thirty two cents of wall
street Love and profit How can there be a quality
to that number The number is a number right Well
yes but rather there are different qualities of earnings What
if we told you that one hundred percent of whatever
dot coms earnings came from Adsit sold tto forty thousand
different buyers because its website was just that popular All
of the growth came intrinsically meaning that users just loved
using the site and nothing meaningful changed on their balance
sheet or wall street Fancy engineers doing creative clever things
with the selling of money Other than that the cash
account went up because dead profits and they kept him
okay Those air very high quality earnings Really sure about
that C we threw a curveball in there We do
that all the time All right Well what if we
told you that seventy percent of their ad sales came
from a subsidiary in china and were all collected in
our m b the chinese currency and that in this
quarter well that the chinese currency appreciated thirty eight percent
relative to the dollar Well essentially all of their big
growth The big growth that we thought was such high
quality earnings came because the chinese currency did well not
because their business did all that well so wait Had
the chinese currency just been flat the company wouldn't have
earned anything close to a dollar thirty to seventy percent
of the sales and almost forty percent of currency gain
there Well it means that the company happened to have
a lot of sails in a country with a fast
appreciating currency It wasn't necessarily a direct reflection that the
company was doing so well and had such high quality
earnings Yeah it's great that they were in a hot
market and highly appreciating currency but if the currency hadn't
gone up so much relative to the u s dollar
in which they report their earnings toe wall street while
the real urn things end of the company would have
been more like a dollar maybe less so that it
be low quality earnings What about high quality earnings Well
really simply you said you'd sell three hundred tractors this
quarter the street thought you'd sell three hundred ten You
actually sold three hundred twenty you said margins would be
twenty percent The street thought they'd be twenty two percent
and they actually were twenty five percent You said you
generate twenty million dollars in cash the street thought you
generate twenty two and you actually did generate twenty five
million dollars in cash High quality financial results Simple You
just did your core business Selling tractors well Quality earnings 00:02:41.233 --> [endTime] quality tractors
Up Next
Normalized earnings are, more or less, the average of what you typically earn. Picture a bell curve. Zoom in on the middle of it. There you go.
What are retained earnings, and do they give you cankles?