La rentabilidad económica explicada a través del tamaño

Authors

The profi t and loss account shows the difference between incomes

and expenses of a company during a fi nancial year. However, the

net income, as an absolute fi gure does not allow identifying the

organizational effi ciency or the effi ciency in the use of resources.

This explains the usefulness of economic profi tability, among other

indicators, to analyse effi ciency. In this research, based on the analyses

of the Spanish civil engineering sector, we have determined three

ways to calculate the economic profi tability, considering the operating

income and three indicators of fi rm size. These indicators, proposed

by the Spanish Accounting Plan as criteria to measure the size of the

company, are the total amount of assets, the average number of

employees in the fi nancial year and the revenues from operations.

The main objective of this work is two-fold. On one hand, we seek

to group Spanish civil engineering fi rms in terms of their economic

profi tability. On the other hand, we try to determine the fi rm size

indicators that characterize each group.

Our fi ndings show three groups of civil engineering fi rms in Spain,

called star group, advance group and standard group. For each one

of these categories, it has been determined which is the relationship

between the different measures of economic profi tability and the

group assigned. The results show that the companies of the star group

have a positive relationship with revenue from operations; companies

of the advance group have a high return with regard to assets and a

low number of employees; whereas the standard companies are been

positively infl uenced by the number of employees and negatively by

revenue from operations and assets.