Capital structure for Diageo

Diageo was created when Grand Metropolitan, plc and Guiness, plc merged in 1997. While the Diageo name is not well known to consumers, its brands are among the most famous including Guinness, Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker and Cuervo. The company recently decided to focus on a strategy to grow through its spirits, wine and beer businesses and divest of its Pillsbury and Burger King subsidiaries. This case study will focus on the proposed capital structure decisions of Diageo.

What are the advantages of leveraging this company? The disadvantages? How would leveraging up affect the company’s taxes? How would the capital markets react to a decision by the company to increase the use of debt in its capital structure?

Now, the advantages of debt capital centre on its relative cost. Debt capital is usually cheaper than equity because, the pre-tax rate of interest is invariably lower than the return required by shareholders. This is due to the legal position of lenders who have a prior claim on the distribution of the company’s income and who in liquidation precede ordinary shareholders in the queue for the settlement of claims. Debt is usually secured on the firm’s assets, which can be sold to pay off lenders in the event of default, i.e. failure to pay interest and capital according to the pre-agreed schedule;

Higher leverage is very likely to create value for a firm considering capital structure change by exerting financial discipline and more efficient corporate strategy changes.

Increased leverage would increase the risk for the shareholder. This is due to the fact that an increased amount of debt would increase the financial return that investors expect. For example, if a company has no debt and posts better than expected earnings, the equity holder would get all of this benefit. If the company had some debt and posted better than expected earnings, the bond holders would get a fixed payment as usual, and shareholders would still enjoy increased profits; the problem arises if worse than expected profits were shown by Kelly Services. If Kelly Services had no debt and posted bad earnings, then the equity bears all the risk in that situation. However, if Kelly

Using the scenarios in case Exhibit 9, what role does leverage play in affecting the return on equity (ROE) for CPK? What about the cost of capital? In assessing the effect of leverage on the cost of capital, you may assume that a firm’s CAPM beta can be modeled in the following manner: BL = BU[1 + (1 − T)D/E], where BU is the firm’s beta without leverage, T is the corporate income tax rate, D is the market value of debt, and E is the market value of equity.

generated by the North American geography of the Diageo’s markets company had ca. 67% of the dollar-denominated debt. Coupled with the relatively large portion of the short-term debt within its capital structure this exposed Diageo to the risk of the strengthening US Dollar and correlated growth of interest rates. Overall, we can conclude that the capital structure policy (in terms of gearing and interest covering) was in line with the policies adopted by the Diageo’s reference group and helped to maintain the borrower’s Investment Grade status, but the composition of the debt maturities and currencies wasn't really prudent By divesting its non-core businesses Diageo could focus on its core activity deploying its assets in related industries (Alcohol and Beer) with the synergetic effect of using the same distribution channels. Amount of proceeds from the proposed divestitures

Although the increased leverage decreases the amount of earnings available to stock holders from 496.9 million to 451.7 million for a total of 45.2 million dollars, it has a positive affect for the company’s tax structure. It actually reduces the company’s tax liability by 83 million dollars! Without the debt they have to pay 952.5 million dollars in taxes. However after an increase of 30% leverage, the new tax liability is 869.5 million dollars.

The purpose of the report is to understand the capital structure of the chosen company on the basis of the financial statements of the company which includes the income statement, balance sheet and the cash flow statement of the company and do the capital analysis of the company as well to find out the advantages and disadvantages in working capital of the company and suggest company logical and useful ways for growing their economy.

Diageo was born as the result of merging Grand Metropolitan plc and Guinness plc. Since the beginning the newly formed company maintained conservative financial policies inherited from the two parent companies; and in general from the British financial management style. There are many indications that confirm that Diageo has managed its capital structure using a conservative approach. Firstly, it is worth mentioning that the company has maintained levels of debt way below its capacity to repay, maintaining the EBIT/interest ratio above optimum levels

The course project involved developing a great depth of knowledge in analyzing capital structure, theories behind it, and its risks and issues. Before I began this assignment, I knew nothing but a few things about capital structure from previous unit weeks; however, it was not until this course’s final project that came along with opening

Diageo was born as the result of merging Grand Metropolitan plc and Guinness plc. Since the beginning the newly formed company maintained conservative financial policies inherited from the two parent companies; and in general from the British financial management style. There are many indications that confirm that Diageo has managed its capital structure using a conservative approach. Firstly, it is worth mentioning that the company has maintained levels of debt way below its capacity to repay, maintaining the EBIT/interest ratio above optimum levels

From this set of problems, we can see that leverage is good for the firm. Leverage has increased the value of the firm as a whole and increased the price per share. Although the cost of debt increases the firm's risk because it increases the probability of default and bankruptcy, therefore shareholders will require higher rates of return on the equity they provide, debt also provides tax savings. And we can see that in table 4, where we calculated the total value of the firm as the pure business cash flows plus the tax savings. Another reason why debt increases firm value is the fact that it reduces WACC, because the cost of debt is generally lower than the cost of equity. Another option that shareholders can do is using homemade leverage. Shareholders should pay a premium for the shares of a levered firm when the addition of debt increases value.

Nevertheless, firms have used leverage even before corporate taxes have been introduced (Maris and Elayan, 1990). This implies the existence of some market imperfections, which benefit the use of debt financing, thus enable a trade-off of the cost and benefits of debt resulting in an optimal capital structure, where marginal cost equal marginal benefits.

Rao (2001) made an attempt to explain the variation of capital structure across industries in India during pre and post liberalization regime and also examine if there is any significant change in average industry level capital structure during post liberalization regime. The study is based on industry wise data of 85 industries in manufacturing sector the results shows that there has been significant decrease in leverage during post liberalization regime and there has been change in set of explanatory variables for capital structure. The most significant explanatory variables for capital structure during pre liberalization regime were the measure of profitability, risk and asset type. During post liberalization regime measure of profitability, growth and asset type were the most significant variables.