We are extremely cautious about pricing. We recognize the consumer environment is still very fragile. We have had a great success over the past year, and in fact 18 months, in building our customer traffic almost against the odds, again despite what is a very difficult consumer environment still. [BBW]
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Halliburton CFO Can’t Speak for Anyone Else, But His Company Is Going to Be Just Fine
- Caleb Newquist
- September 17, 2010
The demand for fossil fuels remains high; can you believe it?
Halliburton Co. (HAL) remains bullish on the recovery of its oil services business, which was hit hard last year by the economic downturn, Chief Financial Officer Mark McCollum said Thursday.
“We continue to be very bullish about the recovery itself,” McCollum said in a webcast presentation to investors. The company is seeing increases in the pricing of contracts in North America, where activity in the third quarter “remains high.” The North American market “continues to do very well,” he said.
You people with poor attitudes really aren’t helping matters.
Halliburton CFO: Still Bullish About Economic Recovery [Dow Jones]
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Your CFO Might Be Clueless about How IFRS Will Affect Your Company
- Caleb Newquist
- July 31, 2009
In some very comforting news, CFO’s in a recent poll said they’re unsure about how at transition to IFRS would affect their company.
More scary stats include 8% of those surveyed said that they are “very familiar” with how their company will be affected and 43% said they were not familiar at all. So what does all of this IFRS ignorance mean?
Check out the list after the jump
A) Lots of CFO’s don’t give a rat crap
2) Lots of CFO’s don’t really believe IFRS will come to the States
D) Lots of CFO’s need to work on their qualifications
The obtuseness may work out though. At the pace the conversion debate is going, by the time the conversion gets done we’ll all be dead.
Survey: CFOs unsure how international rules will affect U.S. business [DBJ]
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If You Believe the AICPA, Hiring Is Looking Good
- Adrienne Gonzalez
- May 20, 2011
Sometimes we get job reports from certain mainstream media outlets that shall remain nameless that look a tad suspect but in the case of this info from the AICPA, I think we can safely rely on the findings.
Here’s the good news via the Journal of Accountancy:
On the demand front, hiring is back on the upswing after decreasing from 2007 to 2008. In 2007, the total number of accounting hires was 36,111. That dropped to 25,488 in 2008 but climbed to 33,321 in 2010. A large portion of that increase was in firms with fewer than 10 CPAs on staff. Firms of that size increased their hiring projections from 11,432 in 2008 to 16,342 in 2010 (see Exhibit 1).
In terms of the types of positions CPA firm new hires were recruited to fill across firms of all sizes, accounting and auditing still commanded a narrow majority at 51%; followed by taxation at 25%; other at 16%; and information technology at 8%.
The accounting and auditing share of new hires was down from 60% in 2007, with the declines coming from firms with 50 or more CPAs. Hiring of new CPA graduates likewise decreased for information technology (down 5 percentage points from 13%). Tax showed a slight increase (2 percentage points) with the strongest gains coming from firms with fewer than 10 CPAs, while the largest growth since 2007 was in the “other” category.
The percentage of overall firms expecting to hire the same or more new accounting graduates than last year also is up—to 89% from 74% when the question was asked in 2008.
Here’s the next obvious question: are we talking about real, created-from-nothing jobs or are we talking about covering massive staff turnover popularized in public accounting by serf-like working conditions and disappointing compensation? Because hiring the same guy in four different firms doesn’t add up the same as hiring four new accounting grads. Duh.
Oh, and something else – where’s 2009? It doesn’t appear in any of the included exhibits, nor is it mentioned in the Journal of Accountancy article even once. The full survey, available from the AICPA’s website, doesn’t specifically mention the exclusion of 2009 in the survey methodology. We aren’t one for conspiracy theories (yeah, right) but it seems suspect that an entire year would just disappear and fail to get a single mention. I mean it was only two years ago.
We’ll dig into the survey results in more detail later, maybe once we track down 2009. Though not specifically mentioned in the above charts, the entire 2009 Trends in the supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits report can be found here.