Subsidiary Management Panel

Description

From here, you can manage your subsidiary. This panel is comprised of three parts:

• CEO information table: It shows information regarding the current CEO. See the CEO page for more details regarding the stats appearing in this table.
• Private company information table: This table shows the following data:
  • Cash balance: similar to the player cash appearing in the Dashboard Panel, this amounts doesn't include the subsidiaries' money.
  • Non-operating assets: business assets not used in any project. They can be used for future projects.
  • Tax loss carryovers.
  • Total bank loans (not including subsidiaries' loans).
  • Total (market value) bond debt (not including subsidiaries' bonds).
  • Line of credit.
  • Debt average interest rate.
  • Duration of assets (in months).
  • Duration of debt (in months).
  • Current cost of capital.
  • Optimal cost of capital.
  • Current debt/equity ratio.
  • Optimal debt/equity ratio.
  • Borrow/repay for optimal ratio (positive value for borrowing, negative for repay).
• Subsidiary management action buttons:
  • Capital contribution: Select the number of millions you wish to transfer to your subsidiary. It also shows the estimated duration of assets after the transaction. The maximum allowed to transfer is given by your current cash balance.
  • Stock contribution: This action allows you to transfer one of your fully-owned subsidiaries to the target companies. When clicking on the button, you will be shown the Diagram of Holdings. In red, it is colored the current company and in green are shown the companies you can transfer. After you choose a company, you will be prompted to confirm the operation. Press confirm to confirm the transfer, or cancel to go back to the panel. This action is only shown if you have at least one fully-owned subsidiary different from the current company (otherwise there is no other company to transfer).
  • Transfer subsidiary: This is a sort of opposite of a stock contribution. This action allows you to transfer one of the selected company's fully-owned subsidiaries to the target companies. When clicking on the button, you will be shown the Diagram of Holdings. In red, it is colored the current company and in green are shown the companies you can transfer to yourself. After you choose a company, you will be prompted to confirm the operation. Press confirm to confirm the transfer, or cancel to go back to the panel. This action is only shown if the current company is fully-owned, and they also have at least one fully-owned subsidiary.
  • Sell subsidiary: Instruct the current subsidiary to sell the totality of one of their subsidiaries. When clicking on the button, you will be shown the Diagram of Holdings. In red, it is colored the current company and in green are shown the companies you sell. After you choose a company, you will be prompted to confirm the operation. Press confirm to confirm the transfer, or cancel to go back to the panel. This action is only shown if the current subsidiary has at least one subsidiary. Note that the current subsidiary receives the money, not you!
  • Set dividend per share: Select the amount of dividends per share you wish to receive each quarter. You can only pay regular dividends from retained earnings.
  • Pay extraordinary dividend: Select the number of millions you wish to receive as an immediate cash dividend. It also shows the estimated duration of assets after the transaction.
  • Borrow money: Select the number of millions the company will borrow from the bank. You will be shown the estimated duration of debt after the transaction and the current interest rate on bank loans. It is important to note that bank loans have a floating interest rate, meaning that it gets updated every turn based on the general interest rate and the company's credit rating. The maximum allowed amount to borrow is limited by the line of credit.
  • Repay loan: Select the number of millions the company will repay from bank loans. You will be shown the estimated duration of debt after the transaction. The maximum allowed to repay is given by your current cash balance and the total bank debt.
  • Choose new CEO: This will open the CEO table, from where you can select a new CEO. See the corresponding page for more details
  • Change company name.
  • Change company symbol.
  • Issue bonds: When issuing bonds, you need to select the years to maturity (between 1 and 100 years), the amount to raise in millions, and, optionally, you can use part of the proceedings to repay some of the bank loans. When modifying those values, you will get updated information regarding the estimated new duration of debt, the interest rate on the bonds and the company's credit rating after the issuance. The minimum amount to raise is $100M and the maximum is given by the line of credit.
  • Buy back bonds: This will open the Buy Back Bonds Table, from where you can choose which bonds you wish to buy back, and how much. See the corresponding page for more details.
  • Tax-free liquidation: This action allows you to perform a tax-free liquidation of one of the current subsidiary's fully-owned subsidiaries. When clicking on the button, you will be shown the Diagram of Holdings. In red, it is colored the current company and in green are shown the companies you can merge into the current company. After you choose a company, you will be prompted to confirm the operation. Press confirm to confirm the operation, or cancel to go back to the panel. This action is only shown if the current subsidiary has at least one fully-owned subsidiary.
  • Issue new shares: Select the amount to raise in millions to raise as product of issuing new shares. By doing this, you will reduce your percentage of ownership in the current subsidiary. By changing the amount to raise, you will see the estimated percentage of ownership after the transaction. If this goes below 50%, you will be shown a warning indicating that you will lose control of the company. Once the current subsidiary issues new shares, it needs to wait at least 12 months before a new issuance of shares can be done. Also, the maximum amount to raise is limited to 5% of the subsidiary's market cap.
  • Buy back stock: Select the amount in millions you wish the subsidiary to buy back from the public. This will increase your stake in the company. By changing the amount to buyback, you will see the estimated percentage of ownership after the transaction. The maximum amount to buyback is restricted by the company's cash balance and the amount of shares available to the public.
  • Company strategy: You can allow or disallow the subsidiary to perform the following operations:
    • Do acquisition?:If selected, the company will attempt to perform acquisitions. This is influenced by the CEO's acquisition focus. Otherwise, the company won't attempt to do any acquisitions.
    • Optimize cost of capital?:If selected, the company to try to optimize their cost of capital by taking/repaying loans, issuing bonds or buying them back. This is also influenced by the CEO's debt tolerance. See the Cost of Capital page for more details.
    • Optimize capital allocation?:If selected, the subsidiary will move money around with their subsidiaries to maximize the overall market value. See the Capital Allocation Optimization page for details about how is this done in the game. Regardless of the selection, this only will be attempted if the subsidiary itself has subsidiaries.

Strategy tips

• The Debt average interest rate considers the whole current company, including subsidiaries. Even though the company itself may be paying little interest on debt, this number may be higher if some of their subsidiaries may be paying more interest on their debt. Additionally, this number may be higher if the company issued bonds with a high coupon payment.
• Regarding debt, bank loans have variable interest rates, while bonds have a fixed interest based on coupon payments.Thus, you can "lock" a good interest rate by issuing bonds when interest rates are low (and your company has good credit rating), even if you may not need the money in the short term.
• New CEOs are periodically spawned, so it can be a good idea to look at it periodically if you are looking for a better CEO than the current one (or if the current CEO is about to retire. In this game, all CEOs retire at 65 years).
• A high amount of non-operating assets may be a product of a big project with high capital requirements fails. Companies can later use those assets for new projects (see the Projects Panel for details). Companies won't sell non-operating assets unless they are in financial distress.
• Tax-free liquidations are very useful when you wish to consolidate your companies. Additionally, by merging two companies, the bigger company will have a higher market share, which can unlock powerful economies of scale benefits. Since companies can start at most one new project per turn, this means that by merging companies you lose "project capacity" sort of speak. Thus, it only makes sense to do tax-free liquidations when either both companies are relatively big, or one company has big tax loss carryovers that won't be used in its totality (maybe because the company shrank and has now huge tax loss carryovers which cannot use).

Related concepts

• Company Info Panel.