Anyway, after looking at Microsoft (MSFT) fin. statements, I quite like the US ones (i.e. their ARs). They are short and sweet (so far I've only looked at MSFT and MCD), i.e. no stupid power point style meaningless pictures, and sound-bites like some of the Brit ones I've seen.
However, where there's a silver lining, sometimes there's a cloud.
In find, some of Yank semantics of words such as "net" slightly different than ours, plus their notational conventions (I find) are sometimes less obvious.
My current contention is Interest income and expense. If we look at an example of a UK registered firm e.g. Croda (CRDA), we see in their P&L statement (https://www.croda.com/en-gb/investors/annual-report#) we can see on page 100:
Financial costs (12.1)
Financial income 1.1
Here it seems like the net position re. interest is -11.0. (They owe the bank £11M)
However for MacDonalds we see two entries on page 26:
[1] Interest expense-net of capitalized interest of $15.5, $15.9 and $14.0 521.90
[2] Nonoperating (income) expense, net 37.90
After some head-scratching (and looking around the rest of report) I believe their net interest position is: -559.8. (They owe the bank $559.8M).
I believe that entry [1] is always an expense, and the "net" bit means "includes" the 3 separate capitalized interest items. And I believe that [2] is to be interpreted thus:
If the following figure is parenthesised then this is income, hence positive, whereas if unadorned it's an expense i.e. negative.
Anyone got any opinions/comments on this?
thanks Matt