Research On The Relationship Between Customer Concentration And Real Earnings Management

Earnings information is important information to reflect the company's operating results.It's an important basis for stakeholders to make judgments and decisions.But earnings manipulation has caused widespread distortion of corporate earnings data,not only detrimental to the interests of investors and other stakeholders,in the long run,is not conducive to the healthy development of economy and society.Therefore,the earnings manipulation has always been the focus of attention in academia.Earnings management can be divided into Accrued earnings management and real earnings management.With the strengthening of regulatory and external audit,manipulating earnings by accruals is becoming increasingly difficult,and many companies turn to real earnings management.There are many factors can affect real earnings manipulation.Such as economic environment,business factors,managers and accounting characteristics of the system itself and others,but few scholars realize the effect of customer—the key stakeholders of Enterprise,on real earnings manipulation motivation.In recent years,China's manufacturing industry widespread severe overcapacity,oversupply is the market norm.In this case,the customer become an important strategic resource,Establish long-term partnerships with key customers to ease the pressure of competition,to gain competitive advantage has important strategic significance.Problems this paper studied including:First,whether the enterprise customer concentration will have an impact on its real earnings manipulation;Second,when enterprises need to manipulate earnings,whether or not have a preference on the operating means;Third,what role institutional environment play in the relationship between enterprise customer concentration and real earnings manipulation.With the above problems,this paper use the manufacturing listed companies as samples,by theoretical analysis and empirical research,gets the following conclusions:First.The higher is the corporate customer concent ration,the more intense motivation to imlenment their real earnings manipulation behavior.With growing dependence on customers,loss of key customer will bringy serious losses.The client need security and stability of supply.They tend to choose suppliers who operating in good condition,some strong customers will require suppliers to take a prudent financial policy.When faced with financial difficulties or pressure from customers,in order to avoid the loss of key customers,companies may use real earnings manipulation manner to meet customer's expectations.Second,customer motivated real earnings manipulation,primarily used to manipulate production costs and manipulation.important customers typically have a strong bargaining power,companies have very limited space to manipulate sales,and good customer relations and a steady demand make enterprises can bear the adverse economic consequences of the production costs manipulation.So companies mainly use expense and production costs manipulation.Third,improve the institutional environment can inhibit the relationship between client concentration and real earnings manipulation,and in the various elements of the institutional environment,the financial market environment and market environment play a major role.