Impact of working capital management on firm's profitability: Empirical evidence from Vietnam

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of working capital management on the firm's profitability. The research sample includes 119 non-financial listed companies on Vietnam stock market over a period of 9 years from 2010 to 2018. Two statistical approaches include Ordinary least squares (OLS) and fixed effects model (FEM) are employed to address econometric issues and to improve the accuracy of the regression coefficients. The empirical results show the negative and significant impacts of the working capital management, which measured by cash conversion cycle (CCC) and three components of the CCC including accounts receivable turnover in days (ARD), inventory turnover in days (INVD), and accounts payable turnover in days (APD) on the firm's profitability measured by return on assets (ROA) and Tobin's Q. It implies that firms can increase profitability by keeping the optimization of the working capital management measured by the CCC, which includes shortening the time to collect money from clients, accelerating inventory flow and hold the low payment time to creditors. Besides, the profitability of firms was impacted by the sale growth rate, firm size, leverage, and age. Therefore, this paper provides a new insight to managers on how to improve the firm's profitability with working capital management.