Introduction After years as a teacher and principal frustrated by the inability to effectively track school and student progress, Stacey Boyd and HBS classmate Mandy Lee founded Project Achieve, an information management system for schools. In a quickly changing industry with fast-moving competitors, Project Achieve aimed to use leading-edge technology to reduce the workload of teachers and administrators while simultaneously keeping parents and students aware of performance. In an attempt to raise capital from an array of investors, Boyd needed to assess the firm’s value before moving forward. _Project Achieve’s Competitive Advantage_ Project Achieve hopes to differentiate itself from its competitors via its emphasis on a …show more content…
We assumed an asset beta of 1.15 (the median asset beta of the three comparable companies) and a debt beta of 0 (with no interest bearing debt) for Project Achieve. Using the 30-year treasury rate (5.94%) as the risk-free rate because of Project Achieve’s expected life and a historical 7.0% market risk premium, we calculated Project Achieve’s discount rate at 14.0%. This discount rate values Achieve as a public company, comparable to its public counterparts. As a non-public start-up, however, Project Achieve is far more risky than the more established comparables discussed above. Thus, we added a 5% start-up risk premium to reach an appropriate 19% discount rate for the valuation of Project Achieve. (See Exhibit #1) Valuing Project Achieve In order to forecast the value provided by each customer type to Project Achieve, we must first identify the breakdown of customers based on the probabilities given in the case, and then forecast the cash flows associated with each type of customer. To determine the probability of a generic targeted school falling into any customer category, we created a decision tree. (Exhibit #2) Per our analysis, there are five end user states – perpetual Achieve Express users, two-year users of Achieve Express, perpetual users of Achieve Express and Achieve Logic, two-year users of Achieve Express and Achieve Logic, and targeted schools that didn’t respond – all with varying
For the purpose of calculating the net present value of the project, an appropriate cost of capital has to be calculated at which free cash flows of the project should be discounted. Since the project will be solely financed by selling new shares, cost of equity will be used as the discount rate. Beta for the company can be assumed to be equal to average of the betas of the competitors of the company. This average beta value comes out to be 1.2. Risk free rate is 0.17% while risk premium has been estimated to be 6%. Thus by putting these values in CAPM formula, we can find the cost of equity for the company which is 7.39%.
The first project proposal is Match My Doll Clothing line expansion consisted of expanding matching doll and child’s clothing and accessories. The second project proposal is Design Your Own Doll by creating customizable “one of a kind” doll features through the company’s website. The project selection criteria would base on quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis would base on the evaluation of discounting cash flow forecasts to determining the Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and the Payback period of each proposed project. The qualitative analysis would include the potential project value of the company’s overall strategy, innovation, key project risks, and the project interdependencies to the whole company.
The relatively well posed project with promises of great future pay offs must be examined closely nevertheless to determine its true profitability. As such, the Super Project’s NPV must be calculated, however before we proceed we must acknowledge the relevant cash flows. The project incurred an expense of testing the market. This expense, however, must not be included in our cash flow analysis because it can be considered a sunk cost. This expense is required for ‘taking a temperature’ of the market and will not be recovered. Other sources of cash flow include:
This is to ensure that the necessary raw materials and physical resources are available at each stage, and that the workforce on site has the right skills for the scheduled work. The project management team will need to produce a series of planning documents that can be accessed throughout the project. Each member of the project management team must know their role and responsibilities, including which sections of the workforce they will be directly managing.
At the new WACC of 19%, the home appliance and agricultural machinery projects are valued based on their inherent levels of risk. The beta of the industry average home appliance project is 0.95, whereas the beta for the industry average agricultural machine project is calculated as 0.88. CAPM was then employed to find the cost of capital of each project. The cost of capital for the home appliance and agricultural machinery projects were found to be 10.4% and 9.92%, respectively (Appendix B). This analysis allows Star Company to allocate funds to projects that create returns greater than the industry cost of capital for each specific project.
Our estimated cost of capital, 20.81%, is lower than Ricketts’ expected return, 30%-50%, thus the investment is worthy. However, it’s higher than other pessimistic members’ expected return, 10%-15%, making the decision more complex and requiring further valuation。
Southwest traditionally uses a 5% premium over the weighted average cost of capital as a discount rate for long-term projects. This makes certain that the project will only have a positive net present value and be worth the investment if it gives investors a premium for the additional risk they must take on. The expected return on the project of 14.5% gives a 5.9% premium over the calculated
in our calculations, as this company exhibited dramatic value differences to others in the sample, (likely to skew our results and prove misleading). Using the average of the revised sample field for each ratio, we inserted Torrington’s values where appropriate to generate an entity value. The findings generated two values for Torrington, 606 million and 398 million. Taking the average of these two numbers, Torrington exhibited a relative value of 502.41 million. Because of the lack of related information given in the case, and the often large differences in measures amongst competitors, different capital structures, internal management strategies, there remained many unknowns in our model. We decided it would be best to use this valuation to reaffirm our assumptions in our DCF valuation. (Please see exhibits)
The topic of valuation of early-stage companies, patents, and technologies have been a topic of study since the late 1980’s. Since the work published by Amit et al (1990) a body of management science literature was published around the value relevance of non-financial information that quantifies the human capital of the founding team. Amit et al posit that
In order to evaluate the prospective IRRs from the Boeing 7E7, we first try to estimate an appropriate required rate of return for accepting this project. The capital asset pricing model is applied to estimate the cost of equity of the commercial aircraft division:
WPC has used a discount rate of 15% to evaluate potential projects for the last 10 years. Many in management are correct in thinking that this rate should be evaluated on a much more frequent basis. The current rate of 15% is much too high considering the yield on treasury bonds has declined from 10% to 5% over the last ten years. In order to calculate the correct discount rate we must first determine what their equity and debt ratios are. As you can see in Exhibit1, in order to find the total value of equity we must multiply the number of total outstanding shares of stock times the market value of each share. Completing this calculation shows us that WPC has $12 billion in outstanding equity. WPC also has $2.5 billion in outstanding debt. If you add the debt and equity together we see that WPC has a total of $14.2 billion in outstanding financing. Assuming the 10 year rate of Government Bonds of 4.60% as our risk free rate and using the Capital Asset Pricing Model we find that that WPC’s return on equity is 11.2% (See Exhibit 1). As stated in the case, Worldwide Paper Company has an A bond rating so we can use the 5.78% for their return on debt. Combining all of these variables in the Weighted Average Cost of
The present value of the net incremental cash flows, totaling $5,740K, is added to the present value of the Capital Cost Allowance (CCA) tax shield, provided by the Plant and Equipment of $599K, to arrive at the project’s NPV of $6,339K. (Please refer to Exhibit 4 and 5 for assumptions and detailed NPV calculations.) This high positive NPV means that the project will add a significant amount of value to FMI. In addition, using the incremental cash flows (excluding CCA) generated by the NPV calculation, we calculated the project’s IRR to be 28%. This means that the project will generate a higher rate of return than the company’s cost of capital of 10.05%. This is also a positive indication that the company should undertake the project.
The use of an accounting rate of return also underscores a project 's true future profitability because returns are calculated from accounting statements that list items at book or historical values and are, thus, backward-looking. According to the ARR, cash flows are positive due to the way the return has been tabulated with regard to returns on funds employed. The Payback Period technique also reflects that the project is positive and that initial expenses will be retrieved in approximately 7 years. However, the Payback method treats all cash flows as if they are received in the same period, i.e. cash flows in period 2 are treated the same as cash flows received in period 8. Clearly, it ignores the time value of money and is not the best method employed. Conversely, the IRR and NPV methods reflect that The Super Project is unattractive. IRR calculated is less then the 10% cost of capital (tax tabulated was 48%). NPV calculations were also negative. We accept the NPV method as the optimal capital budgeting technique and use its outcome to provide the overall evidence for our final decision on The Super Project. In this case IRR provided the same rejection result; therefore, it too proved its usefulness. Despite that, IRR is not the most favorable method because it can provide false results in the case where multiple negative
Translating the many project requirements, risks and costs into a single cohesive platform to manage the implementation of the Desire2Learn (D2L) learning management system is the intent of this analysis. One of the most critical success factors of any project plan is the balancing of risk, costs and time constraints to ensure the overarching project is completed on or before schedule (Cleland, 1985). The action definition and plan design components of the D2L Learning Management Systems are defined and discussed in this project plan analysis with specific focus on timing and resource allocations. In addition, this analysis has been created to serve as the framework to guide the implementation of the D2L Learning Management System over the duration of the project. Resources for this plan's completion include the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the district, Information Systems and Information Technology (IT) department staff members, the superintendent, the vendor professional services team and the vendor training and implementation staffs. All of these teams and individuals need to be orchestrated towards a common objective and timeline in order for the project plan to succeed. Creating and maintaining a collaborative platform is essential for the attainment of project plan deadlines and milestones, serving as a platform for communication and knowledge
The following paper analyzes a project from financial perspectives using the capital budgeting techniques like Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR).