#peer comparison

Welcure Drugs & Pharmaceuticals Limited (WELCURE, BSE: 524661), established in 1992 and headquartered in Delhi, India, is a penny stock in the pharmaceutical sector, currently trading at ₹13.60 as of June 30, 2025. The company historically engaged in manufacturing and marketing pharmaceutical formulations, including tablets, capsules, dry syrups, antibiotics, vitamins, analgesics, and other…

We interviewed a Vice President, Financial Reporting at a $700M revenue public company. His focus is on technical accounting. Here’s his take on using Calcbench for financial reporting.

Q: How did you find Calcbench?

We were using a competitive product. It was expensive for what we were looking for. We wanted a tool that could help us understand the cash, debt, ROE,… of our competitors. When you are looking at seven or eight companies, it becomes cumbersome. I am not sure how we finally came upon Calcbench, but we cycled through free trials before we settled on purchasing the platform.

Q. What, in particular, do you like about Calcbench?

We do a lot of footnote searches. For us, being able to search XBRL tags and easily pull tables is important. We even started using Calcbench to pull our own data. It’s just an easier lift to get trends.

Q. How can we optimize your Calcbench experience?

We didn’t purchase the Non-GAAP data, but that’s probably the next step. We’d like to understand, for example, the adjusted EBITDA of our competitors. Also, right now we are probably doing more searches than we need to do. Until today, we were not aware of some of the features (e.g., Common Sizing) that might help with our analysis. And, we’re not using things that could probably help us in the future, e.g., competitor alerts.

Q. What’s the Calcbench data being used for?

Generally, we are using Calcbench data to guide our own disclosures. We’re looking to understand market-cap type trends, PE ratios and the like. We’re not using it to understand new accounting standards and how they are reported. We’re also not using it for compliance purposes, but that’s a possibility for the future.

Q. You read the blog. What would you like to see us analyze?

Now that 2018 annual reports are mostly filed, the 2018 proxy statements are starting to arrive. That means we can move on to our next piece of financial data to analyze: the CEO Pay Ratio.

That number compares the CEO’s total annual compensation to annual compensation of the firm’s median employee. The SEC began requiring pay ratio disclosure in 2017 proxy statements — which means this year’s proxy statements offer our first instance to see how that ratio is changing over time.

Calcbench users can search for CEO Pay Ratio disclosure. Just go to our Multi-Company or Interactive Disclosures pages, and enter “CEO Pay Ratio” in the standardized search metrics field on the upper left. That will return the pay ratio disclosed by whatever companies you are researching.

What can we say about CEO pay ratios so far? A few things…

First, it’s early in the proxy season, so financial analysts don’t have many 2018 pay ratio disclosures so far. We searched the S&P 500 and found only 21 firms that have reported pay ratios for both 2017 and 2018. But more such disclosures will be coming as proxy season unfolds, so if CEO pay is something you study, you’ll want to check back with us regularly.

Second, those pay ratios we do already have are mostly trending upward — but perhaps not as widely as cynics might expect. Of the 21 firms we examined, 12 have higher pay ratios in 2018, but eight more had lower ratios. (One firm’s ratio held steady.)

Then again, it’s still early. Maybe as more firms file 2018 pay ratios, the balance will skew higher and the cynics will be vindicated. We don’t know yet. Table 1, below, shows the five firms with the largest 2018 pay ratios so far.

An important point to consider here is why pay ratios might be fluctuating. For example, if a CEO receives most of his or her compensation in the form of stock awards, the company’s shares might have done quite well in 2018.

That would certainly enlarge the CEO’s total compensation, and therefore boost his or her pay ratio. But that’s not the same as a Scroogey McScrooge CEO reporting a higher pay ratio because he cut the median employee’s salary while raising his own base pay.

Critics of the CEO Pay Ratio Rule — and don’t die of shock here, but many CEOs do dislike this rule — say the number can be confusing, or even misleading. They’re not wrong; it can be misleading, if financial analysts don’t understand where the numbers in the ratio come from and how those numbers fluctuate from year to year.

Calcbench subscribers can do this by using our Trace feature to see how a CEO pay ratio was calculated. The trace will whisk you back to the proxy statement and the underlying data.

For example, American Electric Power ($AEP) reported a 2018 pay ratio of 111. That comes from CEO Nick Akins’ total compensation of $12.2 million last year, compared to the median employee compensation of $110,125.

You could also then compare that against AEP’s disclosure from 2017, when the pay ratio was 102 — stemming from $11.5 million in CEO compensation, against $113,085 for the median employee.

Now, you might ask: where did those changes in Akins’ compensation come from? Jump to AEP’s summary compensation tables, and you can find the answer. Akins did get a raise in base salary of $40,00o to $1.415 million, and he also got a much larger incentive bonus: $2.9 million, compared to $1.7 million last year. His stock awards, pension contributions, and other compensation, however, actually fell.

From time to time we revisit how large, for-profit health insurers are faring financially. Now that 2018 numbers are filed for seven of the largest such firms, we can declare that they are still alive — although perhaps not as hale and hearty as they were 12 months ago.

We pulled up data for the following firms:

Anthem

Centene

Cigna

Humana

Molina Healthcare

UnitedHealth Group

Wellcare Health Plans

We reviewed their revenue, operating expenses, operating income, operating cash flow, and net income; comparing 2018 to 2017, and 2017 to 2016.

Table 1, below, shows the most recent numbers for all seven firms collectively. At first glance they look OK. Revenue, operating income, net income all going up; that’s good. Can’t say we love the decline in operating cash or the increase in operating expenses, but nobody needs to administer CPR for a data table like this.

Now let’s look at Table 2, comparing 2016 to 2017. We see a much more rosy complexion here: revenue not growing quite as quickly, but operating expenses growing more slowly, and operating cash flow popping along with a 31.2 percent increase. Net income popped even higher.

What happened? For starters, six of our seven companies saw declines in operating cash flow; only UnitedHealth ($UNH) kept cash growing. Humana ($HUM) also saw operating income drop by 27 percent, which pulled down net income by 31 percent.

Last week we had a post noting the sharp increase in goodwill and intangible assets listed on the balance sheet of CVS Health ($CVS). Those assets ballooned last year as result of CVS’s merger with Aetna, so that they now account for 58.6 percent of all assets the company lists.

That single example got us wondering: what other companies have reported a sharp increase in the value of goodwill and intangibles? So we visited our Multi-Company database page to investigate.

Our study was straightforward. We identified 263 firms in the S&P 500 that have reported goodwill and intangible assets for both 2018 and 2017. First we calculated how much those two line items were as a percentage of total assets, in both 2017 and 2018. Then we sorted our sample population based on largest gain in percentage from 2017 to 2018.

You can see our results in Table 1, below.

Some context: Among our 263 firms collectively, goodwill and intangibles accounted for 21.8 percent of all assets in 2018, unchanged from 2017. The median firm was a bit different: 30.8 percent in 2018, up from 28.5 percent. That’s a jump of 230 basis points in one year.

The nine above, however, are all well beyond the median. So financial analysts following any of these firms would have two questions. First, why the firm you’re following see such a sharp increase? Second, do you believe that increase is warranted, given all the other information you have at hand?

For example, sometimes the increase could be due to a large merger. Well, is the acquiring firm placing a lot of goodwill on the value of the target; or did the target bring a lot of goodwill with it because the target had acquired other firms in the past? That answer could leave a financial analyst with more questions to ponder about management quality and strategy, and whether that goodwill will meet expectations.

Or perhaps the increase comes more from other intangible assets rather than goodwill. Those could be patents, trademarks, contractual obligations — that is, things that are more reliable producers of cash. You might still have questions about whether those things are producing enough cash, or might be vulnerable to other forces that could devalue the asset. But questions about the value of intangible assets are different (sometimes very different) than questions about goodwill.

To demonstrate our point about follow-up questions, Table 2, below has our same list of companies with their changes expressed in dollar terms, rather than percentages. Look at Pentair ($PNR), ranked No. 1.

The value of Pentair’s goodwill and other intangibles actually fell from 2017 to 2018 in dollar terms. But total assets fell even more, so goodwill and intangibles ended up accounting for a larger percentage of the total anyway. Why? That’s an excellent question to ask Pentair executives.

Do It Yourself

All of this is easy to find in Calcbench. Just select the peer group you want to study, and use our Multi-Company page to pull up goodwill, intangibles, assets, and any other line-item you want. (For example, you might also want to compare goodwill and intangibles to shareholder equity.)

Nava Bharat Ventures Ltd- Company Profile & Financial Analysis

ABSTRACT

Nava Bharat Ventures Limited (NBV), the flagship company of the Nava Bharat group, operates within different product-geography segments in the business verticals of power generation, ferro alloys, mining and agribusiness. In power generation, it has a capacity of 434MW and it operates coal fires thermal power plants and biomass power plant in AP and Orissa. The ferro alloys division…