Divisional Hurdle Rates - Randolph Corporation

the sale of germicidal, sanitation, and antiseptic products for health care uses. However, the beta given in the appendix is the levered beta, which we have converted to unlevered beta and then averaged the unlevered beta of the two comparable companies. This unlevered beta has then been applied to the proposed capital structure of 30% debt and 70% equity. This is the unlevered beta of the unit under consideration. This is then converted to calculate the levered project beta as 0.936. The levered beta for Chiron is 0.85 and for pathogen is 0.90. This means that Montagne Medical Instruments Company's germicidal, sanitation, and antiseptic products unit carries more business risk compared to its competitors’ viz. Chiron and Pathogen.

Ross, S. A., Westerfield, R. W., & Jordan, B. D. (Eds.). (2011). Essentials of corporate finance (7th ed., Rev.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Irwin.

The table below shows the equity betas for the firms presented in the case (using Jan-92 to Dec-96 equal weight NYSE/AMEX/NASDAQ as market portfolio):

As a deep-discount brokerage, Ameritrade planned to improve its competitive position by price cutting, technology enhancements, and increased advertising in mid-1997. Before initiating the plan, Ameritrade needed know whether the investment returned more than it cost. We were hired to estimate the cost of capital correctly. The key question is to find suitable comparable firms to estimate Ameritrade’s asset beta, since it was a recently-listed firm. We thought discount brokerage companies were best due to same revenue resources. Proper risk-free rate and market risk premium should also be chosen carefully, and we used 30-year bonds YTM and the annual return difference

A correct response requires that you find an appropriate industry beta and measure for levered/unlevered betas and requires that you define cost of equity capital and free cash flow (FCF) – you may need a formula for FCF.

The historical beta comes from historical data. This kind of beta would slope coefficient in a regression, and associated with company's stock returns and market returns. This approach is conceptually straightforward, and complications quickly arise in practice.

* Stock Beta: Exhibit 5 shows a detailed measurement of the company’s stock returns in relation to the rest of the market through 5-year historical price and index data. The analysis includes monthly returns of both the NYSE and the S&P 500 index in order to capture a comprehensive view of the market return. In each comparison, the monthly returns of the Target stock and market are plotted on Y-axis and X-axis respectively to get the regression line’s slope or beta. The analysis arrives at an average beta of 0.988 which indicates a similar movement of Target stock’s returns in comparison to the whole market over time.

The regression that we performed in excel for both stocks yielded a beta of .73576 for Reynolds, and a beta of 1.4198 for Hasbro. In question 2 we learned that although Reynolds stock was riskier independently, adding it to the portfolio made it more diversified compared to adding Hasbro, due to the fact that it was less correlated to the market portfolio. Beta is a measure of the volatility, or systematic risk, of a security or a portfolio in comparison to the market as a whole. Therefore, since the beta of Reynolds is lower than Hasbro, our beta calculations align with the fact that Reynolds stock makes the overall portfolio less risky. This finding is also intuitive when considering the nature of the companies; Reynolds is a Tobacco company meaning that is should be less sensitive to changes in market conditions than a toy company like Hasbro.

The Equity beta for the whole company and for the commercial division is calculated in the appendix.

The company’s debt ratios are 54.5% in 1988, 58.69% in 1989, 62.7% in 1990, and 67.37% in 1991. What this means is that the company is increasing its financial risk by taking on more leverage. The company has been taking an extensive amount of purchasing over the past couple of years, which could be the reason as to why net income has not grown much beyond several thousands of dollars. One could argue that the company is trying to expand its inventory to help accumulate future sales. But another problem is that the company’s

1.a) To value Spyder Active Sports Inc., we decided to use the WACC method since we can easily value its cost of assets with the data immediately available to us in the case. We first unlevered the beta’s of 7 comparable companies and took the average to get a comparable unlevered beta for Spyder (Exhibit 1). Since we are assuming Spyder is entirely equity financed, its unlevered asset beta is equal to the beta of its assets. We now have a rough estimate of Spyder’s asset beta, we can

To estimate the cost of equity, we need to compute the beta of equity for each division using comparable companies. As the betas of debt were not provided, we made 2 assumptions: a. same business lines have the same beta of debt; b. Expected return of debt = Rf + βb*[E(Rm) – Rf*(1-T)] (Rf: risk free rate, E(Rm): expected

In order to answer the question a numerical example will be provided. In table 2 the original data are reproduced (Ceramic Coatings product of percentage of corporate assets times estimated divisional beta => 0,10 * 0,95 = 0,095 => this reduces weighted average corporate beta to 0,795).

When first looking at potential projects to pursue, we always prioritize determining which correct financial information to use when determining our project’s β (beta)(OR METRICS). When calculating the project beta we first determined our firm's levered beta. When comparing the monthly return data of Smitt corporation's stock over the past five years to the S&P 500 over the same time period, we are given a levered beta of 1.131.The next step is to remove our debt considerations from the thought process, which means calculating the unlevered beta. Using the previous five years of tax rates and debt/equity ratios, we were able to find the average sensitivity(OR beta) of all monthly returns to be .877.

Levered Beta is calculated using regression analysis and beta is the tendency of a security's returns to respond to swings in the market. A Beta of greater than 1 indicates that the security's price will be more volatile than the market.