Go to the Johnson & Johnson’s investor relations sales and earnings page at www.investor.jnj.com/sales-earnings.cfm. The company reports sales on a quarterly basis, so download all available sales reports and set the last four quarters’ sales figures aside as an “out-of-sample” test group. Use the rest of the “worldwide” historical sales figures to forecast what the last four quarters’ sales figures would have been expected to be, and then perform a MAPE analysis on your forecasts. How accurate was your forecast, and do you think you could have been more accurate if you had calculated forecasts for each component of worldwide sales (“U.S. consumer sales,” “international pharmaceutical sales,” etc.) separately?
Sample Solution
