Financial Benchmarking of Telecommunications Companies

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the financial performance of telecommunications companies with the help self-organising maps. A total of 88 companies is evaluated and benchmarked on the basis of seven key ratios, calculated for five consecutive years 1995-99. To conduct benchmarking with several financial key figures in a changing business environment is difficult and time consuming for today’s managers and there exists a need for an easy and quick tool to accomplish this task. Furthermore, financial analysts and executives need efficient tools for their work to make comparisons and to trace company performance over time. In this study, we have collected financial data from the Internet and used selforganising maps, a form of neural networks, to analyse telecommunication companies’ financial performance. The self-organising map method turned out to be a good analysing, clustering and visualising tool for depicting patterns and company movements over the years, within the business line of telecommunications companies.