LOS A requires us to:
evaluate a company’s past financial performance and explain how a company’s strategy is reflected in past financial performance
Strategy is the plan of action created to achieve the performance or goals. Some of the examples of objectives or goals of the companies for growth and sustenance are, becoming a low-cost provider, producing high-quality products, innovating technologies, getting a market edge, etc. To achieve these goals the companies formulates certain strategies like producing high volumes with low margins, or low volumes with high margins, increasing the research and development cost, introducing shorter production cycle, higher marketing cost, high inventory turnover, etc.
Performance, on the other hand, measures the accomplishment of the strategies. We need to measure the performance using the financial analysis techniques such as ratio analysis, cross-sectional analysis, etc. Performance measures should always reflect if the performance was as per the strategies of the company or not.