- We've talked about the balance sheet.
Now let's look at an actual balance sheet.
I have here the actual balance sheet for Walmart.
Now, you should say, how did he get his hands
on the actual balance sheet for Walmart?
And is it even legal for me to be looking at this?
Yes, it's legal.
I actually downloaded this Walmart balance sheet
from the archives of the U.S. government.
Every publicly traded company in the United States
is required to send in their balance sheet
every single year.
So, we're looking at Walmart's balance sheet.
Here's a listing of their assets
as of January 31st, 2018 on the left side,
and January 31st, 2017 on the right side.
So look at the first asset listed, cash.
Do we know what that is?
Sure.
It turns out that we will be able to identify
quite a few of these assets.
Cash is $6,756, hmm.
I don't know about you, but my first insight
from looking at this balance sheet is that, wow,
Walmart doesn't have as much cash as I thought they would.
I myself have got almost that much, $6,556,
and Walmart is a big, multi-national company
with over 10,000 stores around the world.
Oh, look up in the top left-hand corner,
and you see the amounts are in millions.
So this cash is $6.756 billion.
Okay, that makes a lot more sense.
Look at the third item in the list,
inventories.
Right, we're not surprised that Walmart's
got a bunch of inventory.
Over $43 billion worth, we see here.
Now, what's the inventory?
Inventory is the stuff on all the shelves
and all the Walmarts and Sam's Clubs locations
around the world.
Look down in the middle of the list.
We see property and equipment of $185 billion.
That's the amount that Walmart has spent
to buy buildings and lands and trucks and store shelves,
the stuff that they're using in their business,
that's called property and equipment.
Down at the bottom of the list,
we see that total assets are $204 billion.
This is the total amount that Walmart spent
to buy all of its assets as of January 31st, 2018.
Now at this point, you might be saying,
now wait, not so fast.
There are lots of other things here
that we didn't talk about.
Well, this is just an introduction to the balance sheet.
If you were taking a full-blown accounting course,
you would learn about all of these other items,
but here we're just introducing the balance sheet,
so don't worry if you don't understand everything here.
You do understand three key items here,
cash, inventory, and property and equipment.
Again, total assets, $204 billion.
That's the total amount that Walmart has spent
to buy all of the assets it needs to do business.
Now, why did Walmart choose that random date,
January 31st, 2018?
Why didn't they compile their asset list
as of December 31st, 2017?
Why did they choose the 31st of January?
Lots of retailers, Walmart and many others,
choose to do their accounting on January 31st
because on December 31st,
they're just finishing up the holiday selling season.
It's their biggest selling time of the year.
The last thing they want to do is to say,
okay, everybody, knock off the selling
and let's do some accounting.
No, no no no no.
Wait until things have died down
at the end of January, then we'll do the accounting.
Let's remember this total asset number, $204 billion.
What we want to know now, is where did Walmart
get the $204 billion to buy those assets?
That is the other half of the balance sheet.