(i) maximising the wealth of its shareholders and (ii) achieving continuous grow

Have you read the examiners answer, because it is hard to add much to what he has written!

The wealth of shareholders is measured mainly by the share price and by the dividends they have received.

The question asks about continuous growth in the earning per share, which means exactly what is says – has the earnings per share been growing each year or not.

My answer was not the slightest bit insulting.

I am more than happy to give further clarification if you say which part of the answer causes a problem – there is not much point in me rewriting the whole answer!

Maximising the wealth of shareholders and achieving continuous growth in EPS are not specific topics.
The question said that these were the objectives for the company and asked you to calculate if they had been achieved.

My answer to the post explained what was meant by shareholder wealth, and by continuous growth in EPS.

However, as I wrote, it is difficult to add anything to the examiners answer – his answer was very good.
There is not much point in rewriting the entire answer on here!

Since you have posted under this heading, then obviously you had a problem with some part of the answer. If you post which part of his answer was causing the problem for you then I will obviously explain.

In an ideal world you would have done all the calculations, but that is not possible in the time and would not be expected.

The first thing to do is address the two objectives. Calculating the EPS is very quick, and you do not even need to calculate the growth percentages because it is clear from the numbers that there is continuous growth.
Calculating the return to shareholders takes a bit longer but should be OK – if you are not clear about the arithmetic in the answer then ask again.
If that was all you had done then you would have got about 6 marks out of 12 (and your object always is to be getting 50% of each part as fast as possible – whatever extra marks you then get are a ‘bonus’ 🙂 )

Whatever time you have left for this section should be spent calculating as many of the industry average ratios as you can.
Pick the quickest ones first (return on capital employed is a pretty quick one for example).

Again, you would not be expected to do all the ratios in the time. If you look at the marking scheme you will see that the maximum marks for each bit of that part of the question add up to 15 marks. Even if you had a perfect answer you would only get 12 marks, so it means that you could miss bits out and still get 12 marks (if you see what I mean). This often happens – and it does mean that you do not need perfect answers to still get full marks.

Getting full marks on any part is difficult, but everyone should be able to get certainly half marks reasonably quickly.

Hope that helps!