What drives firm performance: Case of Kazakhstan

Abstract

This paper is the first to study the factors that affect a firm's performance in a developing country of Central Asia. We use profit margin as an indicator of a company's performance and consider the rate of profit as a function of the company's size, industry concentration, and ownership type. Our study focuses on more than 3000 Kazakhstani companies' accounting measures throughout 2011 - 2016 years. The potential conclusion of this paper is the existence of a positive relationship between profit margin and a firm's size. The relationship between profit margin and industry concentration is also investigated and two different concentration ratios show different results.