Korea has since the 1970s seen its rapid economic growth but the financial crisis in 1997 put the country on the desperate need of restructuring comprehensively all the economic sector including opening of the domestic financial market to global firms...
Korea has since the 1970s seen its rapid economic growth but the financial crisis in 1997 put the country on the desperate need of restructuring comprehensively all the economic sector including opening of the domestic financial market to global firms. Despite such desperate efforts, Korea had to suffer a large-scale of bankruptcy of not only small and mid-sized companies including venture ones but also big conglomerates. Besides, getting worse, the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the United States which started in 2007 has brought the global recession and economic downturn, which in turn led to the high possibility of bankruptcy of domestic small venture firms which are believed to be very vulnerable to that suffering when compared with big conglomerates.
Once a company goes bankrupt, it could badly affect stakeholders of investors, creditors, employees and business partners and they have to face big financial losses and furthermore, bankruptcy tends to largely damage society and economy. Therefore, the significance of the study of business bankruptcy is even more emphasized and has been considered as an important subject domestically and globally.
Over the past several decades, there have been many studies of bankruptcy prediction, but numerous number of enterprises is going bankrupt even nowadays. It is that the previous studies on bankruptcy prediction have been mainly focused on financial aspects of big or mid-sized companies. As a result of that, their results cannot be easily applied to analyzing small and mid-sized venture companies. For this reason, since the IMF crisis, the importance of predicting the bankruptcy of SME venture businesses. In particular, the characteristics of SME firms show that non-financial factors as well as financial ones play an important role for their growth. Many studies have focused on this issue over the last few years. However, the results of the researches and the scope of utilization seem to be limited so far because the scope of the non-financial factors is too broad to define and contains too many subjective features to objectify. Most of all, there have been insufficient financial and systematic supports for SME companies to establish systems and secure workforces that are necessary for making use of such achievement in practice.
For this reason, in this study, I intend to identify non-financial factors suitable for bankruptcy prediction and verify the effectiveness of them so that they can be utilized in actual works for the purpose of reducing the bankruptcy of SMEs and venture businesses. First of all, preceding studies are referred and particularly some important ones among many non-financial factors are largely classified into three categories of industrial environment factor, company’s competitiveness factor and manager’s ability factor. And empirical analysis applied for the details induced from each factor.
Considering the characteristics of non-financial factors, this study conducted a survey of bankers specialized in money lending; total 266 firms that included bankrupted and not bankrupted among the customers enterprises of the bankers over the last 3 years. Various test methods were used for the empirical analysis including t-test, factorial analysis, logistic regression analysis and structural equation modeling. According to the analyses, it is suggested that industrial environment factor, company’s competitiveness factor and manager’s ability factor are closely connected each other and heavily related to the bankruptcy of firms; in particular, manager’s ability factor is very important element in predicting the bankruptcy of business. For this reason, it is suggested that the non-financial factors verified in this study can be utilized effectively in predicting the bankruptcy of business in the future. Some of the factors are being used systematically. It may be difficult to systematically implement other factors for the purpose of bankruptcy prediction; however, they are still effective tools to that end. In addition, this study is very useful in that it has achieved scientific improvement in the study of bankruptcy prediction as well as offered practical and useful enhancement through a series of systematic research processes.