You will be able to find the business description, risks, financial statements and notes in both kinds of report.
Marcus has owned Larkspur Precision for three years and has never opened its annual report. He bought it on a colleague's tip, checked the price most days, and read the occasional news article. When he finally downloads the report, it runs to 180 pages, opens with photographs of smiling engineers and a letter from the chairman about resilience, and he closes it after ten minutes. That is what most investors do, and it's why the report is one of the few places a patient reader still has an edge.
From here to module 8, Larkspur is the company we work on. It's made up, and so are its page numbers and figures, but its report is built like a real SGX annual report. Marcus's US chip designer, also with made-up figures, stands in for a 10-K.
SGX-listed companies publish their annual reports, results announcements and every other material announcement on SGXNet, which you reach through the company announcements section of the SGX website. Search by company name and filter by announcement type. Most companies also post the same documents on the investor relations page of their own website.
US-listed companies file their annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a 10-K, which anyone can read free on the SEC's EDGAR database. Search by company name or ticker. Quarterly reports are filed as 10-Qs, which lesson 6.7, Results announcements, earnings calls and the 10-Q, covers.
Always download the full document, not a summary from a finance website. Summaries choose what to show you.
A 10-K follows a structure set by SEC rules, so every company's report has the same items in the same order. That makes it fast to find things once you know the map.
Item 1, Business; Item 1A, Risk Factors; Item 3, Legal Proceedings; Item 7, Management's Discussion and Analysis; Item 7A, market risk; Item 8, Financial Statements and Supplementary Data, which includes the notes and the auditor's report
Executive pay usually sits in a separate document, the proxy statement filed before the annual meeting, and the 10-K refers to it. Marcus's chip designer's 10-K put the business description on page 4, risk factors on page 14, management's discussion on page 41, the financial statements on page 62 and the notes from page 68.
SGX annual reports have more freedom in layout. Most follow a similar order: corporate profile, chairman's statement, operating and financial review, board and management, corporate governance report, sustainability report, and the financial statements, which begin with the directors' statement and the independent auditor's report and end with the notes. Many also include shareholding statistics and a section on interested person transactions, which lesson 6.5, Management incentives, ownership and related-party deals, uses.
In Larkspur's made-up report, the operating and financial review starts on page 14, the corporate governance report on page 38, the auditor's report on page 88, the primary financial statements on page 94 and the notes on page 102. Shareholding statistics sit near the back, on page 172. Write page numbers like these down the first time you open any report. You'll come back to the same pages for years.
The chairman's letter is written to reassure. It's usually the least informative part of the report, which is why analysts leave it until last, if they read it at all.
They start with three things. The business section or operating review, to understand how the company makes money and how that changed during the year. The risk factors, which lesson 6.2, Business review and risk factors: what management must disclose, teaches you to read for change. And the cash flow statement, because cash is harder to dress up than profit, as module 7 shows in lesson 7.4, Cash flow statement and free cash flow.
After that come the auditor's report and the notes, which is where the numbers are explained and qualified. Lessons 6.3 and 6.4 cover each.
Marcus's first pass through Larkspur took forty minutes, using page numbers rather than reading front to back. He came away with one fact that surprised him: 85% of revenue and almost all the profit came from parts for chip equipment, and the coatings business the chairman's letter spent two pages on was small and barely profitable. He'd have missed it entirely reading in order.
If you want to read your own payslip, CPF statement, insurance policy or loan offer this carefully, that belongs to Read the fine print: payslips, statements, policies and contracts. Its lessons use the same habit this module does, finding the few lines that matter before reading the rest, applied to documents about your own money rather than a company's.
Now pick one SGX company, ideally one you own, and one US company. Download the latest annual report from SGXNet and the latest 10-K from EDGAR, and write down the page numbers of five sections in each, starting with the business, the risks and the cash flow statement.
Download the latest annual report of one SGX company and one 10-K and write the page numbers of five sections in each.
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