Evaluation of the factors affecting corporate performance of Malaysian listed companies.

This study investigated internal factors, including company's size, age, growth, capital structure and ISO 9000 registration, and an external factor, the category of industry, which impact corporate performance in a sample of Malaysian companies. To achieve this objective, the annual reports of 162 companies were collected and an seven-factor corporate performance evaluation model was tested based on the hypotheses created. The study has utilised seven different measures of company performance: Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE), Working Capital (WC), Return on Sales (ROS), Cash Flow (CF), Economic Value Added (EVA) and Tobin's Q (TQ) ratio, to act as dependent variables in order to examine their relationships with company's size, age, growth, capital structure, ISO 9000 registration and category of industry. This study found that the significant dependent variables that determined Malaysian corporate success were ISO 9000, capital structure, company size and category of industry. On establishing the relationship between ISO 9000 registration and the seven financial performance measures, ROA, EVA, ROS and WC appeared to have significant positive associations with ISO 9000 registration. On establishing the relationship between ISO 9000 registration and the financial performance of Malaysian companies, this study reveals that ISO 9000 registered companies in Malaysia outperformed their non-ISO 9000 registered counterparts in terms of ROA, ROE, WC, ROS, CF, EVA and TQ during the period of this study. Thus, this study lends support to some of the findings reported in Haversjo (2000), Heras et al. (2002) and Corbett et al. (2002) regarding the impact of ISO 9000 registration on company performance. ISO registered companies were also found to be younger than their counterparts, and they also tended to be larger in size, based on total assets. The growth of ISO companies was better than that of non-ISO registered companies and their capital structure was much l