COMPARISON OF WORKING CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT OF SELECTED CZECH SUGAR COMPANIES FROM CASH CONVERSION CYCLE PERSPECTIVE

Establishing and maintaining working capital should be an essential skill of any business management. The permanent effort to optimize working capital provides many opportunities for increasing the efficiency of corporate capital allocation, including the financial performance of the company. The aim of this study was to fill the research gap in the field of sugar companies and analyze the development of the intensity of the involvement of working capital from the point of view of the cash conversion cycle (CCC), including its decomposition into subcomponents. The study rejected the hypothesis that the length of the cash cycle of sugar companies remains stable over time. This is due to a closer look on the individual entities, which shows significant differences and distinct dynamics in both directions. The causes of these differences are apparently to be found in the organization of the customer supplier relations of specific sugar companies and their development over time. Surprisingly, regardless of the different dynamics of the development of working capital components at the level of individual sugar companies, it can be stated that stock clearly represent the dominant component of CCC weighing working capital for the longest period of time, which confirmed the second formulated hypothesis. Furthermore, a more general trend can be observed, i.e., a reduction of the average inventory turnover time, average receivables turnover time and the maturity period of liabilities for most sugar companies, on the basis of which it was possible to reject the third hypothesis, according to which the average turnover of the CCC subcomponents remains stable over time at the level of individual companies.