Does working capital management affect profitability? Empirical evidence from Indonesia listed firms

This study attempts to examine the impact of working capital management (WCM) on profitability and examine the working capital conditions of several companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX). The sample used is 135 listed firms and were selected from each sector, such as plantation, pharmaceutical, telecommunication, investment, retail, and the cement and metal industries from 2000 to 2019. The variables employed in this study are working capital investment strategy (WCIS), working capital financing strategy (WCFS), cash conversion cycle (CCC), days sales outstanding (DSO), days inventory outstanding (DIO), days payable outstanding (DPO), debt ratio (DR), size, age, and current ratio (CR). The ordinary least squares (OLS) was employed to analyze the data. The results revealed that the working capital investment approach has a positive and significant effect on return on assets (ROA) in all regression models used; the working capital financing approach has a negative effect on ROA but not significant; the working capital investment approach to the gross profit margin in all models shows a negative and significant coefficient; and the working capital financing approach shows a negative and significant sign for all capital used. Based on the type of industry, companies that use a lot of aggressive working capital investment approaches are the agriculture industry and the infrastructure, utility and transportation industries. Meanwhile, companies that mostly take a conservative working capital investment approach are the consumer goods industry, the basic chemical industry and the miscellaneous industry.