What is he WACC and why is it so important to estimate a firms cost of capital?
The WACC (weighted average cost of capital) is a percentage figure resulting from a calculation method by which the adequate cost of capital of a firm is expressed. It considers the composition of a company’s funding, be it debt or equity. A corporation whose source of funding is equity by 100 percent will have a WACC equal to the cost of equity. By contrast, a levered company will have to reflect the cost of debt as well. The WACC takes their respective quantitative contributions to the entire amount of funding, serving hence as an allocation base, into account. As there is a direct relationship between the two portions, debt and equity, in order to calculate
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The cost of debt (cd) as used by the WACC refers to the costs a company incures by raising parts of its funds through debt. As debt has a prior position to equity in terms of claiming it is in most cases supposed to be “cheaper” than equity (moreover the debt costs depend on the leverage). The overall market value of debt of a company can be retrieved by adding all debt positions less excess cash and short-term investments (net debt). Expressed as a relative portion of entire assets and multiplied by the cost of debt it yields the contribution to the WACC figure.
By contrast, the cost of equity (ce) is a quantitative result which can be derived from the CAPM e.g. (capital asset pricing model). It suggests that the cost of equity is equal to the sum of the risk-free rate and a risk premium of an average market portfolio adjusted for a company-specific factor beta. This beta reflects the risk associated with the company whereas a beta of 1,0 is equal to the market risk.
The importance of estimating the WACC properly becomes evident when using it for the valuation of a company. There is a direct and strong correlation between the exact cost of capital and the preciseness of resulting figures. Future free cash flows of orders of magnitudes are discounted sometimes. Hence, the resulting present value is subject to enormous sensitivity and an arbitrary rounding off of the second decimal as in the NIKE case is
General speaking, WACC is the rate that a company’s shareholders expect to be paid on average to finance its assets, and it is the overall required return on the firm as a whole. Therefore, company directors often use WACC to determine whether a financial decision is feasible or not. In this case, I will choose 9.38% as discount rate. The reason why I choose 9.38% as discount rate is because the estimated Debt/Equity is 26% under the assumptions by CFO Sheila Dowling, which is most close to 25% of Debt/Equity from the projected WACC schedule. There might be some flaws existing by using WACC as discount rate. As we know, the cost of debt would be raised significantly as the leverage increased. The investment will definitely increase the firm’s current debt. So, the cost of debt would not keep at 7.75%.
Before moving forward to compute the present value of these cash flows, a terminal value is required to forecast the long term value of the company after 5 years. . Following formula is used to calculate the terminal value.
Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) is the combined rate at which a company repays borrowed capital and comes from debit financing and equity capital. WACC can be reduced by cutting debt financing costs, lowering equity costs, and capital restructuring. In order to minimize WACC, companies can issue bonds by lowering the interest rate they offer to investors as well as, cutting down
10. What is the correct capital structure and weighted average cost of capital for discounting the investment’s free cash flow. Assume a 35% tax rate. A correct response requires that you define capital structure and Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) with a formula. When defining a term with a formula be sure that all the variables are also defined.
WACC= (%of debt) (after-tax cost of debt) + (% of preferred stock)(Cost of preferred stock) + (% of common equity) (Cost of common equity)
The mixture of debt-equity mix is important so as to maximize the stock price of the Costco. However, it will be significant to consider the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) as well so that it can evaluate the company targeted capital structure. Cost of capital (OC) may be used by the companies as for long term decision making, so industries that faced to take the important of Cost of capital seriously may not make the right choice by choosing the right project(Gitman’s, ).
In order to find the WACC, we need to find the cost of the components of the capital structure and their proportion in the total capital.
At first, WACC and CAPM was attempted to be used as a source of cost of capital. However, for WACC, there is no available proportion of debt and cost of debt for MW. For CAPM, no available data seems to support the acceptable
Moreover, let’s calculate the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC). And in order to calculate it we need to know the capital structure of the company. Knowing the capital structure of the
For this reason, new, or marginal, costs are used in its calculation. WACC is calculated by multiplying the cost of each capital component by its proportional weight and then summing then together. The capital components included in this calculation are a firms after-tax costs of debt, preferred stock, and common stock.
WACC is the appropriate discount rate to use for cash flows with risk that is similar to that of the overall firm. Hansson is concerned that the risk of this project is not similar to the risk of current overall firm’s activities. With this project, the company was taking on much more debt and, Hansson believed that, this project could very well change the risk profile of the firm.
Kd (Wd), Ke (We) and Kp (Wp) are the costs (weights) associated, respectively, with the firm’s interest bearing debt,
Despite this change in price, the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) will give a more accurate representation of what the change in capital structure implies for the firm, by taking account the costs of debt.
WACC is the weighted average cost of capital and provides firms with the idea of the proportion of debt
The Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) is the discount rate used in a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis to present value projected free cash flows and terminal value.