Essentials on Financial Literacy, Up-/Reskilling, and Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence from South Asian Public-Owned Companies (POCs)

This chapter examines, at a firm level, a set of essential economic–financial management skills surrounding the phenomena of liquidity, leverage, and profitability incumbents ought to acquire and/or develop to administer one’s organizational wealth. A theoretical review with a twofold path garnered insights from two scientific domains (corporate finance and strategic management), with particular attention given to dynamic capabilities and stock price change theories. The empirical part of the investigation inferred an up-/reskilling process from an output (i.e., stock price changes) in the short-selling at the secondary market/s. Within the dominant perspective of the shareholder value (appropriation/capture) as a key assumption, the study, based itself on a sample of 10 technological public-owned (Southeastern) Asian companies, headquartered in Vietnam, uses regression modeling to trace back their historical path in the two largest stock exchanges markets and cross-observe, between 2014 and 2020, the outputs of the evolutionary traits of their activities and the extent of their financial capability-building. The findings emphasized the importance of developing capabilities related to “functional analysis” centered on the upskilling of economic–financial controlling activities on two “star” ratios—return on equity (ROE) and price-to-earnings (PE)—as the key ones to the successful market cap of POCs listed in the HNX and HOSE stock exchange.