Week 13 Solutions

Our company will plan to finance our strategy principally through issuing stock and cash flows from operating activities generated from the company’s normal business functions. It is undesirable for our strategy to issue debt because we would like to stay away from interest payments. Our company anticipates our debt to equity leverage ratio to be around 0.5.

* She is considering the cash flow paid to all the equity or debt holders. So she cannot use the equity cost of capital.

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%.

In case they finance with debt, Winfield (the company) would be able to enjoy the tax shield as a result of tax deductible interest expense, hence their effective cost of debt will be 4.225%. However, when financed with stock, the new stockholders will be entitled to perpetuity of $7.5M in dividends. Working out the net present values of the two scenarios as shown in the tables above, Debt financing becomes a favorable option to stock since it yields a higher NPV.

The company position is strong enough so its better that company should use debt financing instead of equity financing.

The company will incur floatation since before tax cost of the new debt will be higher than 8%. It can be included in calculating the cost of debt but these costs are reduced for taxable issuers and therefore can be expensed over the life of the issue.

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.

The comptroller currently finds the weights for the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) from information from the balance sheet shown in Table 2. Compute the book value weights that the comp­trol­ler currently uses for the company’s capital structure.

No. Because the project has an NPV of 0. It will not dilute the value of shareholder equity.

I used WACC as the discount factor, we expect the rate of return to be higher than it, the same at least. The WACC reflects the average risk and overall capital structure of the entire firm [2]. It’s the required return and it presents how much the company pays for the capital it finances. In this case, the cost of equity is 10.33%, the cost of debt is 6.50%. I calculated WACC using those numbers and got a result of 8.49%.

Aside from the two aforementioned proposals the company can raise its leverage in other ways. By conducting DuPont analysis and understanding operating leverage we see that purchasing fixed assets and decreasing stockholder’s equity will raise the equity multiplier and the firm’s operating leverage. In this instance we recommend against this approach as the firm already has a large amount of excess cash above what they require to fund new positive NPV projects and purchase new assets. Investors would rather see their capital returned to them in the form of share repurchases and dividends as it is evident by the company’s cash stockpile that they can

1. Determine the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) based on using retained earnings in the capital structure.

The question that transcends the project is whether equity investors be sufficiently rewarded to justify there financing interests. The answer to this question is dependent

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

INPUT DATA: Amount Needed to Raise Flotation Costs Stock Offer Price Market Value/Book Value Ratio (Dollars in thousands) Assets Cash U.S. Treasuries Mortgage-backed Securities Municipal Bonds Government Agency Securities Total Cash & Securities Residential Mortgage Loans Consumer Loans Business Loans Total Loans Fixed Assets Total Assets Liabilities Passbook Savings Non-interest Checking N.O.W. Accounts Money Market Accounts Certificate of Deposits Total Savings Borrowed Money Other Liabilities Total Liabilities Capital Stock ($100 par value) Retained Earnings Total Equity Total Claims Loan Loss Reserve Allowable Risk Adjustment Weights: No default risk Low default risk Res. loans &