Operating Cash Flow, Profitability, and Earnings Growth: The Moderating Role of Firm Size in Food and Beverage Firms on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, 2022–2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24256/kharaj.v8i3.11941Keywords:
operating cash flow performance, profitability, firm size, earnings growth, moderated regression analysisAbstract
This study aims to analyze the effect of operating cash flow performance and profitability on earnings growth, as well as to examine the moderating role of firm size on both relationships. Employing a quantitative causal-comparative approach, this study draws on a sample of 28 food and beverage subsector companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during the 2022–2025 period, selected through purposive sampling, yielding 112 firm-year observations. Operating cash flow performance is measured by the ratio of operating cash flow to total assets, profitability by Return on Assets (ROA), firm size by the natural logarithm of total assets, and earnings growth by the annual percentage change in net income, all analyzed using Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA) via IBM SPSS Statistics with a mean-centering procedure applied to the predictor and moderator variables. The results indicate that operating cash flow performance and profitability have a positive but statistically non-significant effect on earnings growth, and firm size is not shown to moderate either relationship, with the overall regression model being simultaneously non-significant (Sig. F = 0.450; R² = 0.043), suggesting that the determinants of earnings growth during this period are dominated more by domestic purchasing-power pressure than by firms' internal fundamental performance. These findings imply the importance of macroeconomic context as a screening variable for investors and regulators in interpreting issuers' financial signals, as well as the need for market-demand-oriented strategies for management and the integration of macroeconomic variables in future research.
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