Done by Calvin C

- Aug 2021

In May this year, the CEO of Singapore Press Holding (SPH) had an outburst at a press conference, as he “takes umbrage” at a reporter’s question on editorial integrity. This incident arouse my curiosity on the performance of SPH leadership team and therefore, in this R analysis we will be compare the performance of the old team against the current team by looking at its profit and share prices.

Setup

library(tidyverse)
library(ggthemes)
library(dplyr)
theme_set(theme_light())

Reading the data file on profit

#Preparing data for profit against year
sph.2 <- read.csv("eca_sph_profit.csv")

head(sph.2)

Reading the data file on share price

sph.3 <- read.csv("eca_sph_share.csv")
head(sph.3)

Data Pre-Processing and constructing a new dataframe consisting of company’s profit and share price from 2008 to 2020.

# Removing comma in the numerical column
sph.2a<- sph.2 %>% 
  mutate(profit = gsub(",", "",sph.2$Profit))

#Assign data type and choosing only data required
sph.2a$profit <- as.integer(sph.2a$profit)
sph.2b <- select(sph.2a, Year, profit)

#Preparing data for Share price against year
sph.3a <- sph.3 %>%
  mutate(Year = str_sub(Date,-4,-1))

#Assign data type and choosing only data required
sph.3a$Year <- as.integer(sph.3a$Year)
sph.3b<- select(sph.3a, Year, Close)

#Create single dataframe consisting of profit and share price for 2008 to 2020
sph_perf <- left_join(sph.2b, sph.3b)

#Update column names
names(sph_perf)[2] <- paste("Profit_after_taxation")
names(sph_perf)[3] <- paste("closing_share_price")

#As the new CEO joins after share price of 2017 has closed, he will start from 2018
sph_perf <- sph_perf %>%
  mutate(new_ceo = (if_else(Year>= 2018, 'yes','no')))

#show the dataframe consisting of profit after tax and closing share price for year 2008 to 2020.

head(sph_perf)

Visualisation 1

Before the new CEO joins, the performance of the SPH leadership has been pretty consistent with the worst performance reported at above S$300 million profit in 2016 and the best performance reported just below S$600 million profit in 2012. On 2017, before the handover, the profit for the company stands at just below S$400 million.

After the appointment of the new CEO on 1 September 2017, it is observed that for his first year, he was not able to exceed or maintain the profit level when he took over, ending the year at just above S$300 million, and close to SPH’s worst performing year in the last 10 years.

After his first year, the performance of SPH continues to decline,reporting a profit of below S$300 million for the first time in 2019 and subsequently dives to a loss in 2020.

Visualisation 2

The graph seems to suggests that the new CEO was appointed after the share price has fallen from above S$3.50 before 2016 to below S$3.00 in 2017 and after the previous CEO managed to recover the profit level above the performance of 2015.

At the end of the new CEO first year, share price has crept back up slightly while profit continue to decline. After 2018, the decline of profit level continues and share price of SPH starts to decline as well. In 2020, both the profit level and share price starts to plummet resulting in its worst performance since 2008.

To conclude, the SPH leadership led by the new CEO performed poorly compared to its predecessors as they were unable to bring the organisation back to the profit level and share price under the previous SPH leadership and instead accelerates its decline.