Case Studies

This is where the concepts come together. Work through a fictional company's numbers, ask the right questions, and form your own view. There are no buy/sell answers here — only calculations and observations.

Case study: ABC Manufacturing

A fictional company with three years of numbers. Investigate it yourself before revealing each answer.

₹ crore	FY22	FY23	FY24
Revenue	1,000	1,200	1,350
Net profit	90	110	120
Total debt	300	420	600
Cash	80	70	60
Receivables	150	210	300
Operating cash flow	110	95	60
Shareholders' equity	500	560	610

Shares outstanding

12 crore

Share price

₹150

Market capitalisation

₹1,800 Cr

EPS ≈ ₹10

What happened to revenue?

Is profit growing?

What happened to debt?

What happened to cash flow?

What is the company's ROE?

What is the P/E?

What risks should be investigated?

There is deliberately no buy/sell conclusion. The goal is to practise asking the right questions and doing the arithmetic, not to be told what to do.

Questions to ask about any business

Six questions that apply to every company, from a street stall to a multinational.

What does the company sell?

Describe the product or service in one sentence a ten-year-old would understand. If you cannot, you probably do not understand the business yet.

Applied to a fictional company

ABC Manufacturing sells industrial fasteners — bolts, screws and fittings — to construction firms and vehicle makers.

Try answering these for any company you read about. If a question is hard to answer, that itself is useful information — it tells you where to dig next.

A ten-step analysis process

Tick each step as you work through it. This is a thinking discipline, not an automatic ranking.

Steps completed

0 / 10

Process progress

Keep going

The process ends with your own independent view — not a recommendation from an app. Two people can follow the same steps and reasonably reach different conclusions.

Red flags explorer

Patterns that may warrant further investigation. Click one to see what it looks like and what to check.

Signals, not verdicts

Nothing on this list means something is wrong. It means a question is worth asking.

What it looks like

Borrowings rising much faster than revenue or profits.

Why it may matter

More debt means more interest to service, and less resilience if business slows.

What to investigate

Why is the company borrowing? Is the new capital earning a return? Can cash flows cover interest?

A flag is a prompt to investigate, not proof of wrongdoing. Healthy companies sometimes show these patterns for perfectly good reasons.