Cooperative Economic Sustainability: An Analysis of Sicoob's Financial Statements

Abstract

Cooperativism is a business model where there is an association of a group of people with the same interests to obtain advantages in their economic field, when it comes to credit cooperatives, they offer their members the same services as conventional banks, however, with fairer rates. The largest credit union in Brazil is currently the Sistema Cooperativo Sicoob and an analysis of its financiais statements will be made. The objective of this work will be to verify the performance of the Sicoob Cooperative System in the years 2019 to 2021 using financial indicators, and the specific objectives will be to analyze Liquidity and Solvency, Capital, Basic Profitability and Efficiency and Indebtedness. The method used to obtain the data was through a bibliographic research with a quantitative approach, the data were collected in the Combined Financial Statements, which is a documentation released annually by the cooperative in order to make its Balance Sheet public. The results obtained were performed through calculations and numerically demonstrated the Voluntary Cash in, Immediate Liquidity, Loans/Deposits Ratio, Financial Independence, Leverage, Capital/Depositors Ratio, Equity Fixed Assets, Return on Equity, Total Investment Return, Net Margin, Profit from Assets, Third-Party Capital in relation to total resources, Equity Guarantee in relation to Third-Party Capital and Debt Breakdown. It can be concluded that because it is a differentiated business model, some financial indicators do not apply in cooperatives and shows the importance of analyzing financial indicators to know their position in the market and make decisions about it. The Sicoob System grew in some indicators and remained constant in others, showing that in the period studied, where the economy was lukewarm, it managed to maintain itself using strategies such as growth of physical agencies to avoid stagnation.