Gestion du risque

Columbia, sort and package them in the California and ship them to your customers all over the world. In the process, you are approached to a multitude of risks. There is the risk of political turmoil in Columbia, compounded by the volatility in the dollar-peso exchange rate. Your packaging plant in California may sit on top of an earthquake fault line and be staffed with unionized employees, exposing you to the potential for both natural disasters and labor troubles. Your competition comes from other small businesses offering their own gourmet coffee beans and from larger companies like Starbucks that may be able to get better deals because of higher volume. On top of all of this, you have to worry about the overall demand for coffee ebbing and flowing, as customers choose between a wider array of drinks and worry about the health concerns of too much caffeine consumption.

Not surprisingly, the risks you face become more numerous and complicated as you expand your business to include new products and markets, and listing them all can be exhausting. At the same time, though, you have to be aware of the risks you face before you can begin analyzing them and deciding what to do about them.

A listing of all risks that a firm faces can be overwhelming. One step towards making them manageable is to sort risk into broad categories. In addition to organizing risks into groups, it is a key step towards determining what to do about these risks. In general, risk can be categorized based on the following criteria:

a. Market versus Firm-specific risk: In keeping with our earlier characterization of risk in risk and return models, we can categorize risk into risk that affects one or a few companies (firm-specific risk) and risk that affects many or all companies (market risk). The former can be diversified away in a portfolio but the latter will persist even in diversified portfolios; in conventional risk and return models, the former have no effect on expected returns (and discount rates) whereas the latter do.

c. Continuous Risks versus Event Risk: Some risks are dormant for long periods and manifest themselves as unpleasant events that have economic consequences whereas other risks create continuous exposure. Consider again the coffee bean company's risk exposure in Columbia. A political revolution or nationalization of coffee estates in Columbia would be an example of event risk whereas the changes in exchange rates would be an illustration of continuous risk.

d. Catastrophic risk versus Smaller risks: Some risks are small and have a relatively small effect on a firm's earnings and value, whereas others have a much larger impact, with the definition of small and large varying from firm to firm. Political turmoil in its Indian software operations will have a small impact on Microsoft, with is large market cap and cash reserves allowing it to find alternative sites, but will have a large impact on a small software company with the same exposure.

A logical follow up to categorizing risk is to measure exposure to risk. To make this measurement, though, we have to first decide what it is that risk affects. At its simplest level, we could measure the effect of risk on the earnings of a company. At its broadest level, we can capture the risk exposure by examining how the value of a firm changes as a consequence.