A Study on the Distress Prediction in the Fishery Industry

수산기업의 부실화 요인 및 예측에 관한 연구

The objectives of this paper are to identify the causes of the corporate distress and to develop a distress prediction model with the financial information in fishery industry. In this study, the corporate distress is defined as economic failure and technical insolvency. Economic failure occurs by reduction, shut-down, or change of the business and technical insolvency results from failure to pay the financial debt of companies. The 33 distressed firms from 1991 to 2003 were composed by 14 economic failure companies, 15 technical insolvency companies. 4 companies applied to the both cases. The analysis of distress prediction of fishery companies were accomplished according to the distress definition. The analysis was carried out as two steps. The first step was the univariate analysis, which was used for checking the prediction power of individual financial variable. The t-test is used to identify the differences in financial variables between the distressed group and the non-distressed group. The second step was to develop distress prediction model with logistic regression. The variables showed the significant difference in univariate analysis were selected as the prediction variables. The financial ratios, used in the logistic regression model, were selected by backward elimination method. To test stability of the distress prediction model, the whole sample was divided as three sub-samples, period 1(1990$\sim$1993), period 2(1994$\sim$1997), period 3(1998$\sim$2002). The final model built from whole sample appled each three sub-samples. The results of the logistic analysis were as follows. the growth, profitability, stability ratios showed the significant effect on the distress. the some different result was found in the sub-sample (economic failure and technical insolvency). The growth and the profitability were important to predict the economic failure. The profitability and the activity were important to predict technical insolvency. It means that profitability is the really important factor to the fishery companies.