Valuation - Basic Flashcards
What are the 3 major valuation methodologies?
- Comparable Companies
- Precedent Transactions
- Discounted Cash Flow Analysis
Rank the 3 valuation methodologies from highest to lowest expected value.
Trick question – there is no ranking that always holds. In general, Precedent Transactions will be higher than Comparable Companies due to the Control Premium built into acquisitions.
Beyond that, a DCF could go either way and it’s best to say that it’s more variable than other methodologies. Often it produces the highest value, but it can produce the lowest value as well depending on your assumptions.
When would you not use a DCF in a Valuation?
You do not use a DCF if the company has unstable or unpredictable cash flows (tech or biotech startup) or when debt and working capital serve a fundamentally different role. For example, banks and financial institutions do not re-invest debt and working capital is a huge part of their Balance Sheets – so you wouldn’t use a DCF for such companies.
What other Valuation methodologies are there?
- Liquidation Valuation – Valuing a company’s assets, assuming they are sold off and then subtracting liabilities to determine how much capital, if any, equity investors receive
- Replacement Value – Valuing a company based on the cost of replacing its assets
- LBO Analysis – Determining how much a PE firm could pay for a company to hit a “target” IRR, usually in the 20-25% range
- Sum of the Parts – Valuing each division of a company separately and adding them together at the end
- M&A Premiums Analysis – Analyzing M&A deals and figuring out the premium that each buyer paid, and using this to establish what your company is worth
- Future Share Price Analysis – Projecting a company’s share price based on the P / E multiples of the public company comparables, then discounting it back to its present value
When would you use a Liquidation Valuation?
This is most common in bankruptcy scenarios and is used to see whether equity shareholders will receive any capital after the company’s debts have been paid off. It is often used to advise struggling businesses on whether it’s better to sell off assets separately or to try and sell the entire company.
When would you use Sum of the Parts?
This is most often used when a company has completely different, unrelated divisions – a conglomerate like General Electric, for example.
If you have a plastics division, a TV and entertainment division, an energy division, a consumer financing division and a technology division, you should not use the same set of Comparable Companies and Precedent Transactions for the entire company.
Instead, you should use different sets for each division, value each one separately, and then add them together to get the Combined Value.
When do you use an LBO Analysis as part of your Valuation?
Obviously you use this whenever you’re looking at a Leveraged Buyout – but it is also used to establish how much a private equity firm could pay, which is usually lower than what companies will pay.
It is often used to set a “floor” on a possible Valuation for the company you’re looking at.
What are the most common multiples used in Valuation?
- Enterprise Value / Revenue: How valuable is a company in relation to its overall sales.
- Enterprise Value / EBITDA: How valuable is a company in relation to its approximate cash flow.
- Enterprise Value / EBIT: How valuable is a company in relation to the pre-tax profit it earns from its core business operations.
- Price Per Share / Earnings Per Share (P / E): How valuable is a company in relation to its after-tax profits, inclusive of interest income and expense and other non-core business activities.
Other multiples include Price Per Share / Book Value Per Share (P / BV), Enterprise Value / Unlevered FCF, and Equity Value / Levered FCF.
P / BV is not terribly meaningful for most companies; EV / Unlevered FCF is closer to true cash flow than EV / EBITDA but takes more work to calculate; and Equity Value / Levered FCF is even closer, but it’s influenced by the company’s capital structure and takes even more time to calculate.
What are some examples of industry-specific multiples?
Technology (Internet): EV / Unique Visitors, EV / Pageviews
Retail / Airlines: EV / EBITDAR (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortization & Rent)
Energy: P / MCFE, P / MCFE / D (MCFE = 1 Million Cubic Foot Equivalent, MCFE/D = MCFE per Day), P / NAV (Share Price / Net Asset Value)
Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs): Price / FFO, Price / AFFO (Funds From Operations, Adjusted Funds From Operations)
Technology and Energy should be straightforward – you’re looking at traffic and energy reserves as value drivers rather than revenue or profit.
For Retail / Airlines, you often remove Rent because it is a major expense and one that varies significantly between different types of companies.
For REITs, Funds From Operations is a common metric that adds back Depreciation and subtracts gains on the sale of property. Depreciation is a non-cash yet extremely large expense in real estate, and gains on sales of properties are assumed to be non-recurring, so FFO is viewed as a “normalized” picture of the cash flow the REIT is generating.
When you’re looking at an industry-specific multiple like EV / Scientists or EV / Subscribers, why do you use Enterprise Value rather than Equity Value?
You use Enterprise Value because those scientists or subscribers are “available” to all the investors (both debt and equity) in a company. The same logic doesn’t apply to everything, though – you need to think through the multiple and see which investors the particular metric is “available” to.
Would an LBO or DCF give a higher valuation?
Technically it could go either way, but in most cases the LBO will give you a lower valuation.
Here’s the easiest way to think about it: with an LBO, you do not get any value from the cash flows of a company in between Year 1 and the final year – you’re only valuing it based on its terminal value.
With a DCF, by contrast, you’re taking into account both the company’s cash flows in between and its terminal value, so values tend to be higher.
Note: Unlike a DCF, an LBO model by itself does not give a specific valuation. Instead, you set a desired IRR and determine how much you could pay for the company (the valuation) based on that.
How would you present these Valuation methodologies to a company or its investors?
Usually you use a “football field” chart where you show the valuation range implied by each methodology. You always show a range rather than one specific number.
How would you value an apple tree?
The same way you would value a company: by looking at what comparable apple trees are worth (relative valuation) and the value of the apple tree’s cash flows (intrinsic valuation).
Yes, you could do a DCF for anything – even an apple tree.
Why can’t you use Equity Value / EBITDA as a multiple rather than Enterprise Value / EBITDA?
EBITDA is available to all investors in the company – rather than just equity holders. Similarly, Enterprise Value is also available to all shareholders so it makes sense to pair them together.
Equity Value / EBITDA, however, is comparing apples to oranges because Equity Value does not reflect the company’s entire capital structure – only the part available to equity investors.
When would a Liquidation Valuation produce the highest value?
This is highly unusual, but it could happen if a company had substantial hard assets but the market was severely undervaluing it for a specific reason (such as an earnings miss or cyclicality).
As a result, the company’s Comparable Companies and Precedent Transactions would likely produce lower values as well – and if its assets were valued highly enough, Liquidation Valuation might give a higher value than other methodologies.
Let’s go back to 2004 and look at Facebook back when it had no profit and no revenue. How would you value it?
You would use Comparable Companies and Precedent Transactions and look at more “creative” multiples such as EV/Unique Visitors and EV/Pageviews rather than EV/Revenue or EV/EBITDA.
You would not use a “far in the future DCF” because you can’t reasonably predict cash flows for a company that is not even making money yet.
This is a very common wrong answer given by interviewees. When you can’t predict cash flow, use other metrics – don’t try to predict cash flow anyway!
What would you use in conjunction with Free Cash Flow multiples – Equity Value or Enterprise Value?
Trick question. For Unlevered Free Cash Flow, you would use Enterprise Value, but for Levered Free Cash Flow you would use Equity Value.
Remember, Unlevered Free Cash Flow excludes Interest and thus represents money available to all investors, whereas Levered already includes Interest and the money is therefore only available to equity investors.
Debt investors have already “been paid” with the interest payments they received.
You never use Equity Value / EBITDA, but are there any cases where you might use Equity Value / Revenue?
Never say never. It’s very rare to see this, but sometimes large financial institutions with big cash balances have negative Enterprise Values – so you might use Equity Value
/ Revenue instead.
You might see Equity Value / Revenue if you’ve listed a set of financial and non- financial companies on a slide, you’re showing Revenue multiples for the non-financial companies, and you want to show something similar for the financials.
Note, however, that in most cases you would be using other multiples such as P/E and P/BV with banks anyway.