re: 2011 - 2015 multi-year trend
Just did a quadratic regression on the data for net sales and operating profit for the years 2011-2015. My simplifying assumption is that data from 2011-2015 will lead to a half decent model for predicting what lies ahead, but I'm not making that assumption with the most confidence because of the data from 2016 and 2017. Maybe we could say that with my assumption we can reasonably predict Arcam's future net sales and operating profit trends after the GE-Arcam transition has matured.
Net sales = 96.5 * 1.53 ^ x , where x is in years. Use x = 0 for 2011, x = 1 for 2012, etc. The correlation coefficient was r = 0.989, about as close as you can get to the ideal number, 1. Note that you will not get initial sales of 107.7 when you calculate this with x = 0 since we're fitting 5 data points to an exponential curve. The same will go for the equation for operating profit.
Operating profit = 5.68 * 1.68 ^ x. Use x as you did above to represent years. The correlation coefficient was r = 0.95 which is pretty damn good for a fit.
You might ask questions about doubling time, i.e., from any point in time how much time will elapse before net sales or operating profit double.
For net sales doubling time is about 1.6 years. For operating profit doubling time is about 1.3 years. That's a quick calculation, but ya gotta know a little about logarithms, done by solving the following equations for x-
2NS = NS * 1.53 ^ x , where 2NS represents a doubling of net sales.
and
2OP = OP * 1.68 ^ x , where 2OP represents a doubling of operating profit.
