Problem definition: Smart contract improves the supply chain efficiency by enabling the supplierâs commitment to postshipment financing decisions, which mitigates the bankâs lending risk exposure and thereby reduces the financing cost. This paper investigates how smart contract adoption could facilitate trade finance activities and create value for supply chain firms. Academic/practical relevance: As the emerging blockchain technology could potentially reshape the trade financing landscape, understanding the impact of smart contract adoption and its interaction with trade finance activities is practically relevant and of great importance. Methodology: We develop a two-stage game-theoretic model and adopt supply chain finance theory to characterize the strategic interactions between supply chain firms in the presence of both operational risk (demand uncertainty) and financial risks (credit and liquidity risks). Results: We find that the value of smart contract depends critically on the trade finance structures, including both preshipment and postshipment financing schemes. Under the baseline trade finance model (with purchase order financing as preshipment financing and factoring as postshipment financing), smart contract alleviates the supplierâs overpricing behavior caused by commitment frictions and helps restore the supply chain efficiency. When buyer direct financing serves as an alternative preshipment financing, smart contract might discourage the retailer from offering buyer direct financing, which significantly hurts the supplier and thus reduces the supply chain profit. When invoice trading serves as the alternative postshipment financing, the supplier always chooses invoice trading over factoring because of its trading flexibility, which in turn, makes the commitment frictions ubiquitous and unresolvable (namely, commitment trap). As a result, invoice trading could unexpectedly lead to a lower supplierâs profit. Luckily, such an adoption dilemma can be resolved by smart contract adoption in conjunction with factoring. Managerial implications: Our findings provide guidelines for and insights into when smart contract should be adopted and its interactions with different trade finance schemes. In particular, smart contract adoption does not always benefit the supply chain.
This study develops a dual-channel supply chain model composed of a retailer with capital constraints and a supplier with sufficient funds, in which the retailer can apply the trade credit financing (TCF) from the supplier. First of all, this work introduces inconsistent pricing strategy, and investigates the optimal pricing, sales-effort level decisions and profits of the dual-channel members. Then it investigates the impacts of consumer channel preference, free-riding behavior (FRB), TCF interest rate, cross-channel return (CCR) and unit contribution to the supplier of the CCR products on the optimal sales-effort level, optimal pricing decisions and the profits of each member under the decentralized and centralized decisions, respectively. To reduce the conflict between the two channels, this research proposes a supplier-revenue sharing contract to coordinate the members so as to achieve the win-win performance with the global optimal supply chain profit. Furthermore, this study uses numerical analysis to test the feasibility of the model and conduct sensitivity analysis. The further results are concluded as follows. (1) Supplier's revenue-sharing contract can well coordinate the dual-channel supply chain with TCF, and achieve the win-win performance with the inconsistent pricing strategy. (2) Under the centralized decision, the overall supply chain profit will have a significant increase with a higher offline-channel preference proportion. (3) The growth of the free-riding coefficient will reduce the overall supply chain profit under both decentralized and centralized decisions when consumers prefer the offline channel, but will increase the centralized overall profit when consumer prefer the online channel. (4) Under the decentralized decision, the online channel's profit will go up and the offline channel's profit will go down when the TCF interest rate increase. (5) Under the decentralized decision, the overall supply chain profit can achieve the maximum by setting a lower unit contribution to the supplier of the CCR products if consumers prefer CCR service. Finally, this work indicates some managerial implications, and proposes some issues for future research.
Yongjian Li, Lu Liu, Lipan Feng, Wen Wang · 5 authors
ABSTRACT Trade credit finance (TCF), retailer independent finance (RIF), and partial credit guarantee (PCG) finance are all important financing tools for capitalâconstrained retailers. Risk aversion has a significant impact on financing, but it is difficult to measure. This research investigates the manufacturer's financing provision strategies considering risk aversion and capital market competition. First, an ordinary least squares method with conditional value at risk criteria is proposed to measure the risk attitude of decisionâmakers. Second, the equilibrium mode of financing provision and impacts of risk aversion and the retailer's initial capital are analyzed. Third, a laboratory experiment and numerical analysis are conducted to verify the risk aversion estimation method and other theoretical results. We draw the following conclusions. First, the equilibrium financing provision mode changes with the degree of risk aversion and retailer's initial capital. Although the manufacturer prefers TCF and PCG to RIF, the retailer chooses the RIF mode when its initial capital is low. A variable parameter guarantee mechanism is proposed to encourage more retailers to choose PCG instead of RIF. Second, the riskâaverse financing system realizes superâcentralization (i.e., utility in the decentralized system is larger than that in the centralized system) when the manufacturer is less risk averse than the other participants. A Paretoâoptimality mechanism is designed to realize superâcentralization and coordinate the decentralized financing system. This research provides financing providers with practical guidance on the efficient implementation of supply chain financing.
George Calle, Alisa DiCaprio, Maarten Stassen, Alison Manzer
Abstract As trade policy disruption has become more commonplace, so have the calls for blockchain as a solution. But often the reasoning for this link has been unclear. Using the case study of Brexit as a baseline, the authors map four sources of trade-based uncertainty and explore the extent to which blockchain applications could â when implemented â attenuate supply chain disruption, which has lead to firms taking second best options like reducing investment and switching suppliers. Because the law has not kept pace with technology, the discussion also highlights prominent legal questions raised by blockchain in each instance.
This thesis in Industrial Engineering and Management examines which the critical success factors are for implementing blockchain technology in the context of trade finance. Blockchain is an up-and-coming technology that has yet not been implemented in many organizations. By examining which the success factors are for implementing the technology, a foundation can be provided for future implementation efforts with the hope of achieving a successful result. Furthermore, to assess if an implementation of blockchain has been successful or not, the value of it has been assessed. Through a qualitative study with interviewees from both companies acting in the trade finance industry and experts on the subject of blockchain, information could be gathered in order to confirm the theoretical framework as well asprovide for new findings. The conclusion was that the most important success factors for implementing blockchain, found in the theoretical framework were: "Managing and involving stakeholders (for instance customers and suppliers)", "Clear management support/commitment/involvement of the implementation",and "Understanding of the organization in which the implementation is to take place (its strengths, needs,etc.)". The least important factors proved to be "An in depth understanding of the technology that is to be implemented; what it is and how it works", "Keeping the change communicable and transparent within the organization", and "Extensive project definition and planning". Unexpected findings were that almost all interviewees mentioned that there has to be a real need for the technology in order for it to be successfully implemented. Also, as the very nature of blockchain requires cooperation; it is important to realize that blockchain will require a higher degree of working over organizational boundaries. Another aspect that proved to be important to take into consideration is that the trade finance industry holds legacyand therefore is prone to be resistance to change, especially to a technology of such a highly disruptive character. Lastly, it is of importance to mention that the context also has to be taken into consideration;every organization is different and require different approaches when it comes to implementing blockchain technology. When it comes to how blockchain technology generates value from an organizational perspective, the most common answers were that it enhances collaboration and trust. Many identify value in the problem-solving and more decentralized mindset that blockchain brings. An unexpected finding was that the mere use of the word blockchain will create value, as this enables collaboration and investment. Other reasons given were security, transparency, automation, traceability,and decentralization. Further analysis examined the reasons behind the importance and connection of these answers.
There is little doubt that blockchain technology will change global trade. The question, however, is how it will impact some of the most intractable issues in trade finance. Last year, U.S.$15.5 trillion of merchandise exports were transported around the world. Up to 80% of global commerce requires trade finance to provide liquidity and risk mitigation. However, inefficiencies in trade finance today mean that many applications go unfunded. This U.S.$1.5 trillion trade finance gap is widest in emerging markets and for small- and medium-sized enterprises. Efforts to address these shortfalls have gained limited traction due to the decentralized nature of trade. In this paper, we review the design of enterprise blockchains to explore how changing the architecture of trade finance could impact the drivers of trade finance gaps. By grounding our analysis in the technical architecture of a live, enterprise blockchain platform, we aim to provide a tangible discussion around the technology. Applying blockchain technology to trade finance â regardless of the top of stack application â will directly impact the flow of information, compliance challenges, and profitability in ways that can contribute to a more inclusive trade finance structure.
The current literature on the coordination of operations and finance does not differentiate longâ and shortâterm debts and therefore is silent on how firmsâ debt maturity structure affects their shortârun financial and operational decisions. Through a dynamic inventory model that explicitly captures a firm's periodic decisions on inventory replenishment quantity, the amount of dividends net of capital subscriptions, and the amount of shortâterm debt, we demonstrate that under coordinated shortâterm operational and financial decisions, the firm's optimal inventory level increases initially as its longâterm debt rises; after the firm depletes its shortâterm borrowing capacity, as the longâterm debt rises further, the inventory level decreases and then remains constant. In addition, we find that optimal coordinated decisions, in comparison with decentralized ones, yield lower inventories, require less cash, take larger shortâterm loans, incur a lower probability of financial distress, and yield higher expected dividends net of capital subscriptions. Moreover, longâ and shortâterm debts are substitutes; an optimally leveraged firm needs less longâterm debt if it coordinates its shortâterm decisions than if it decentralizes them.
We study contract design and coordination of a supply chain with one supplier and one retailer, both of which are capital constrained and in need of short-term financing for their operations. Competitively priced bank loans are available, and the failure of loan repayment leads to bankruptcy, where default costs may include variable (proportional to the firmâs sales) and fixed costs. Without default costs, it is known that simple contracts (e.g., revenue-sharing, buyback, and quantity discount) can coordinate and allocate profits arbitrarily in the chain. With only variable default costs, buyback contracts remain coordinating and equivalent to revenue-sharing contracts but are Pareto dominated by revenue-sharing contracts when fixed default costs are present. Thus, for general bankruptcy costs, contracts without buyback terms are of most interest. Quantity discount contracts fail to coordinate the supply chain, since a necessary condition for coordination is to proportionally reallocate debt obligations within the channel. With only variable default costs and with high fixed default costs exhibiting substantial economies-of-scale, revenue-sharing contracts with working capital coordination continue to coordinate the chain. Unexpectedly, for fixed default costs with small economies-of-scale effects, the two-firm system under a revenue-sharing contract with working capital coordination might have higher expected profit than the one-firm system. Our results provide support for the use of revenue-sharing contracts with working capital coordination for decentralized management of supply chains when there are bankruptcy risks and default costs. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.
Joanna BĆach, Monika WieczorekâKosmala, Maria GorczyĆska, Anna DoĆ
IntroductionLiquidity management is a crucial managerial area of corporate finance. There is a common knowledge that even the most profitable company may go bankrupt if it does not manage its liquidity in a proper way. The importance of liquidity maintenance arises in times of crisis characterized by the high volatility of financial markets and clear symptoms of economic downturn.In this paper we focus on the problem of liquidity management by discussing the objectives and functions of corporate treasury. Corporate treasury is relatively new phenomenon, representing a profession dedicated for a defined, complex set of financial management-related tasks in a company. Corporate treasury function may be performed solely or by a dedicated department under the CFO supervision.In particular, the purpose of this paper is to support a thesis that corporate treasury has potential to enhance innovative actions within liquidity management. This potential arises primarily from the holistic managerial approach of the corporate treasury, which is supported by the broad understanding of the entire company and the extensive knowledge of all financial management areas that influence liquidity (through cash inflows and outflows) accompanied by the deep knowledge of financial market and instruments.This is a conceptual paper, based on the analysis of the current literature and practical documents. The paper is organized as follows. In the first Section we present the contemporary views on corporate treasury objectives and functions. The second Section discusses the understanding of liquidity management of a company, with cash management as the core issue regarding actions within, in the context of the core function of corporate treasury. In the third Section we address the potential areas of innovative actions of corporate treasury. The last Section concludes the paper.1. The identity of corporate treasury objectives and functionsCorporate treasury management involves financial activities within maximizing company's liquidity and mitigating various types of financial risk. However, the understanding of tasks and functions of corporate treasury is not homogenous. Possibly, it is partially connected with the clearly visible several stages of the development of corporate treasury functions. The role of the corporate treasury evolved over time, as the financial market was developing and becoming more volatile, with the growing importance of large international corporations (Figure 1).The evolution of the treasury role can be divided into three phases. During Phase I (Immature Treasury, TS 1.0) before the 1970s, treasury functions were decentralized and informal, characterized by manual processes, concerned with operational activities. Phase II (Mature Treasury, TS 2.0) started with the introduction of floating currencies systems and the end of gold standard for US dollar. This led to the increased volatility in financial markets and greater importance of treasury that become focused on financial risk management, using more and more sophisticated tools and instruments. Changing role of the treasury in Phase III (Strategic Treasury, TS 3.0) is a result of globalization process and increased complexity of financial system. Corporate treasury has to coordinate its activity with business partners and support business units in their strategies in order to create value (Polak, Robertson, Lind, 2011, p. 50). It is said that treasury involvement should be increased in all areas that require cash management, asset and liabilities management and financial risk management. It also involves enhanced reporting and communication with internal and external stakeholders as a response to their demand for better information. The strategic role of treasury in Phase III is to deliver value and efficiency for the company and act as a strategic unit to achieve the company's goals. It is stressed that the efficient treasury management is determined by four important factors: (1) centralization, (2) standardization, (3) simplification and (4) automation (Ala, 2011). âŠ
Chinta Venkateswara Rao, Ramachandran Azhagaiah, K. Chandrasekhara Rao
IntroductionWorking capital (WC) is regarded as the lifeblood of a business. It plays a pivotal role in keeping the wheels of a business enterprise running. Every organization whether profit oriented or not; big or small; rnanufacturing or processing needs requisite amount of WC. The efficient management of WC is crucial as it decides the survival, liquidity, solvency and profitability of the concerned business organization. The objective of management of WC is to maintain the optimum balance of each of the WC components. Business liquidity relies on the effective management of receivables, inventory and payables. Firms are able to reduce financing cost and/or increase the funds availability for expansion by 'minimizing the amount of funds tied up in CA (CAs). Much managerial effort is required to maintain optimum levels from non-optimum levels of CAs and current liabilities (CLs). This optimum level is achieved by balancing between the risk and efficiency1 . Efficient management of WC is an integral component of the overall corporate strategy to create shareholder's value. WC is the resultant need of time lag between the expenditure for the purchase of raw material and collection for the sale of the finished product. The continuing flow of cash starting from suppliers of inventory to accounts receivable and back into cash is referred to as the cash conversion cycle (CCC). Focusing entirely on liquidity increase will tend to reduce the chances of profitability of the firm2.Significance of Textile Industry in IndiaAccording to the CMIE, the textile industry has a significant presence in the economic life of India. It plays a pivotal role through its contribution to industrial output, employment generation and export earnings of the country. It contributes towards 14% of the industrial production, 4% to the GDP, 17 per cent to the country's exports and provides employment to 35 million people (both sexes). The Indian textile industry is extremely varied with major sectors such as the hand spun and hand woven sector, the capital incentive, sophisticated mill sector, and the decentralized Power looms / hosiery and knitting sector. The major sub-sectors that comprise the textile sector include the organized cotton / fibre textile mill industry, the man-made fibre / yam industry, the wool and woolen textile industry, the sericulture and silk textiles Industry, the Handlooms, handicrafts, and the jute and jute textile industry3.WC Management EfficiencyEfficient management of WC refers to management of various components of WC in such a way that an adequate amount of WC is maintained for smooth running of a firm and for fulfilment of twin objectives of liquidity and profitability. While inadequate amount of WC impairs the firm's liquidity, holding of excess WC results in the reduction of the profitability. Inefficient management of WC is one of the important factors causing industrial sickness4.Modern financial management aims at reducing the levels of CAs without ignoring the risk of stock outs. Efficient management of WC is an important indicator of sound health of an organization that requires reduction of unnecessary blocking of capital in order to bring down the cost of financing. There are several techniques to estimate the requirements of CAs, which include percentage approach, operating cycle approach, projected balance sheet approach, regression analysis approach etc. The most important aspect of determined and adequate CAs results in uninterrupted flow of production5.Importance of the StudyManagement of WC is very important task for every manufacturing concern. A study of management of WC of textile firms is more important and appropriate for internal and external analysis. Moreover, one of the serious problems faced by the cotton textile industry in India is the incidence of sickness. There are many reasons for sickness of cotton textile industry; one of the reasons is improper management of WC. âŠ
This article believed that the design of financial internal control system between mother and filiations corporation should be fully taken into account the nature, scale of assets, operating characteristics and distribution of shares and other factors. Group holding company's financial management model is the starting point and staying place for finance internal control system design of mother corporation and filiations. It's more feasible for relatively decentralized management under the guidance of the headquarters of the Group. The design of mother and filiations company's financial internal control system should cover fund management, fund-raising management, investment management, management and distribution of proceeds, OIA and evaluation of management, financial key personnel management, as well as financial information management, etc.
Peter H. Grinyer, Peter McKiernan, Masoud YasaiâArdekani
Abstract Hypotheses relating to market, organizational and managerial determinants of profitability and growth are developed and tested using data collected by structured interviews in 45 randomly selected companies in the electrical engineering industry. Multiple regression analysis suggests that market share and barriers to entry are the principal determinants of profit margins, but that tightness of control of working capital and aggressive management style also have an important influence. Centralization of decisionâtaking among smaller companies, too, was associated with greater profitability, whilst more extensive budgetary control and planning of acquisitions or diversification were both negatively correlated with the latter. Profitability was the single most important predictor of the rate of company growth of sales but constraints from organized labor, from sources of finance, and conservative management styles, the rate of product change, R&D intensity, and decentralization all entered significantly.
Linear programming models of specialized financial decision problems such as working capital management [21], short-term financing [22], or capital bug-geting [24] are deficient in that they may lead to decisions which are suboptimal with respect to the firm as a whole. Each model attacks a single decision problem and neglects its interaction with the other activities of the firm. On the other hand, a model which reflects these interdependences and interactions by including the various financing, investment, and operating decisions in a single model tends to become excessively large and inefficient to use. What is needed is a model that incorporates the efficiencies inherent in smaller, more specialized models which can be utilized on a decentralized basis and which can simultaneously lead to decisions that are optimal for the firm as a whole.
Abstract The accounting fraternity has employed regression analysis rather infrequently. This article presents an application of multiple regression analysis to cost control. The context of the application is the consumer finance industry where extensive decentralization makes effective cost control extremely important. The consumer finance industry is made up of companies whose principal activity is making personal installment cash loans under state small loan laws. The cost behavior model employed in this article is developed from the results of multiple regression analysis of cost and other operating data of branch offices of a major consumer finance chain. While the consumer finance industry is used as the basis, it should be emphasized that the procedure outlined would be applicable to other types of businesses as well. The article shows that an important requirement for the applicability of the procedure is the existence of a relatively large number of homogeneous operating units. Consumer finance companies meet this requirement particularly well. However, other types of business also operate with large numbers of homogeneous units-food including service chains and lodging chains. The procedure outlined would, therefore, be applicable to them as well.