Predicting financial distress of the South Korean manufacturing industries

The financial distress forecasting has long been of great interest both to scholars and practitioners. The financial distress forecasting is basically a dichotomous decision, either being financial distress or not. Most statistical and artificial intelligence methods estimate the probability of financial distress, and if this probability is greater than the cutoff value, then the prediction is to be financial distress. To improve the accuracy of the financial distress prediction, this paper first analyzed the yearly financial data of 1888 manufacturing corporations collected by the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund (KODIT). Then we developed a financial distress prediction model based on radial basis function support vector machines (RSVM). We compare the classification accuracy performance between our RSVM and artificial intelligence techniques, and suggest a better financial distress predicting model to help a chief finance officer or a board of directors make better decision in a corporate financial distress. The experiments demonstrate that RSVM always outperforms other models in the performance of corporate financial distress predicting, and hence we can predict future financial distress more correctly than any other models. This enhancement in predictability of future financial distress can significantly contribute to the correct valuation of a company, and hence those people from investors to financial managers to any decision makers of a company can make use of RSVM for the better financing and investing decision making which can lead to higher profits and firm values eventually. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.