My first step was to decide if the weights were done correctly. With Nike and it’s publicly available information I felt that using their market capitalization would be a truer estimate than the book value used by Joanna. I found that multiplying the number of shares outstanding, 275.1 million, times the stock price of 42.09. Total equity ended up being $11,427 million. I felt that the book value of debt was still a reliable number.
Question 1: How, if at all, would you change Cohen’s equity cost of capital calculation? Why? In this case, Cohen calculated the equity cost of capital by using CAPM: rE = rf +βi ( E[rmkt]-rf ) 10.5% = 5.74% + 0.80 * (5.9%) * Risk free rate: The rf should be kept consistent with the time horizon of the investment. Since Cohen did her estimate in 2001 and Nike’s bond will expire in 2021, it is reasonable to use the 20-year T-bond rate, 5.74% as the risk free rate. * Risk premium: Arithmetic mean is often used for one-year period valuation, while geometric mean is better for long-term period estimated expected returns.
* Cost of Equity: * Beta: she used the average beta of the last 5 years, which is also acceptable. However, we decide to use the Bayesian beta calculated with the firm’s present beta as a measure of the future beta assessing for future risk. * Risk-free rate: from the investor’s perspective, we conclude that a 10-year holding period would be more realistic estimate than 20-year. Therefore, we decide to use 10-year U.S. Treasury yield as our risk-free rate in this case. * Risk premium: using the geometric mean from 1926 to 1999 might be problematic, since the risk premium of recent decades is obviously lower than earlier (stated in the lecture).
- Beta alone is not a good predictor of returns. High beta stocks did not outperform low beta stocks. Beta is dead. - High BE/ME is a good predictor of returns. Book to market ratio was the most powerful scaled price variable for predicting stock returns (more than PE and A/ME).
We miss essential information like the interest rate and maturity of the debt to calculate the market value of debt. From the book value of debt and the interest expenses over 2007 we estimate the cost of debt: 2,26/43,08 = 5,25 %. This is 0.7% more than the risk free rate. This seems reasonable when considering the low leverage ratio of the firm and high cash reserves of the firm, on the other side the interest coverage ratio of Tottenham of 1,24 is pretty low. We assume that the amount of debt has been constant over 2007.
Since PacifiCorp is not a publicly traded company, we must use valuation multiples from comparable firms to determine the value of the firm. As you can see in Exhibit 1, if we use the valuation multiples we arrive at an implied firm value of between $6,252 million (low end) and $9,289 million (high end). This means that our offer of $9.4 billion is right in line with the high end valuation of the company. We also used multiples to determine that the market value of equity was worth between $4,277 million and $5,904 million (see Exhibit 1). As stated earlier, we offered to pay $5.1 billion for the equity portion of the company.
4) Good luck! Part I (45 points): Short questions. Either fill in the blanks or mark something as True or False (no need to show calculations here). (1) The two main reasons why acquiring firms’ shareholders do not benefit much from acquisitions are that the acquirer: (2 points) The synergy benefit is over estimated during acquisition process Underestimate importance of “culture compatibility” (2) Suppose during a particular year a firm has a NOPAT of $400, increase in Net Fixed Assets of $50, increase in cash balances during the year of $20, and an increase in noncash net working capital of $45. What is this firm’s free cash flow for the year?
Household survey and national accounts data mostly ref lect basic consumption, and therefore overstate the risk aversion necessary to match the observed equity premium. The risk aversion implied by the consumption of luxury goods is more than an order of magnitude less than that implied by national accounts data. For the very rich, the equity premium is much less of a puzzle. AS DEMONSTRATED BY GROSSMAN AND SHILLER (1981), SHILLER (1982), Mehra and Prescott (1985), and the extensive literature that follows, the risk of the stock market as measured by its co-movement with aggregate consumption is insufficient to justify the extent to which its average return exceeds the return on short-term government debt. We propose a partial resolution to this equity premium puzzle by distinguishing between the consumption of basic goods and that of luxury goods.
Since the hurdle rate is usually the cost of capital, WACC for the company is calculated as below: Cost of debt 5.88% After tax 3.53% D/E 28.21% Company Beta 1.15 Cost of equity 10.95% WACC 9.3% It means that any project that will not return 9.3% will be rejected and anything above 9.3% has a good chance of being accepted. Actually the required rate of return and the systematic risk of cash flows for each project were not equal. Actually the projects with low return has a lower beta and would have a lower hurdle rate and projects with higher return have a higher beta and higher hurdle rate. The application of single hurdle rate will result in rejection of projects which return is higher than the actual hurdle rate and accept projects which return is lower than the actual hurdle rate. In other words, it would lead to false rejects for Telecom services while signaling false accepts for the Product and Systems group.
Joanna used the current yields on the 20-year U.S. Treasury bond as her risk-free rate. According to Exhibit 4, the risk-free rate was 5.74%. We thought that this figure was too aggressive. Since the risk-free rate is a theoretical interest rate at which an investment may earn interest without incurring any risk. In practice, the risk-free rate is often a short-term Treasury rate.