The Narrative Fallacy
In an ideal world, investors are supposed to look only at cold hard facts and analyze them while making an investment decision. However, till now, we know the fact that any of these decisions are not 100% rational. There is always an iota of emotions mixed in decision making, even for the most rational investors. […]
Risk-Based Supervision of Pension Funds
The number of pension funds, as well as the amount of money being managed by these funds, is increasing exponentially every day. This is creating advantages for the investors. However, this is also creating a lot of problems for the regulators. This is because regulators have scarce resources and they have to manage the regulation […]
Advantages and Disadvantages of Freely Floating Exchange Rates
The freely floating currency system is the predominant system of foreign exchange that is prevalent in the world today. As globalization has progressed, more countries have abandoned their currency pegs and have allowed their currencies to freely float. Some have been forced to do so by market participants whereas others have made their choice in […]
Financial Investment – Meaning, its Need and Different Types of Investments
It is human nature to plan for rainy days. An individual must plan and keep aside some amount of money for any unavoidable circumstance which might arise in days to come. Future is uncertain and one must invest wisely to avoid financial crisis in any point of time. Let us first understand what is investment […]
The Clearing House System
There is much more to the international financial system than what meets the eye. For instance, if you were to ask an average person about the parties involved in making a payment, very few will come up with the term clearinghouse. This is because they think about payers, payees, and even intermediaries. However, the concept […]
It begins with the same old way. Companies have to compute the contribution margin for each of their products. This is a possibility if a company has a couple of hundred products. If there are thousands of products, we may have to use the sales based approach mentioned in the end of this article.
So, for each of the products find the contribution margin and divide it by the selling costs, to derive the contribution margin ratio.
The next step is to find the relative weights of each of these products. The common way to do this is to estimate the relative proportion of sales that different products have. For instance, if for every 1 product A, we sell two product B’s, their ratio is 1:2. We will need a ratio of the sales of all the products. This is found out by going into the empirical sales data that the company has. On the other hand, we can also find out if the sales are expected to change in the future period and make adjustments in our ratio based on this expectation.
The final step is to calculate a weighted average. This is done by multiplying each contribution margin ratio of every item with its relative weight, adding all of them together and then dividing them by the total number of weights. The number we obtain is our multiproduct contribution margin.
Now, this calculation is completely based on our assumption about the relative weights of the sales. If the weights change too much, the contribution of the weights will also completely change. So we need to understand that if the proportion of sales is changing, our contribution margin is obsolete.
For large companies like Wal-Mart where there are thousands of products, the multiproduct contribution margin is calculated based on the sales dollars. Instead of finding contribution margin ratio for each item, one ratio is found out for increase in every sales dollar. This number is pretty accurate, if it is computed using the correct empirical estimates.
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