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Module 3 CASE:

Module 3 - Case

Capital Budgeting and the Cost of Capital

Assignment Overview

Before starting on this assignment, make sure to thoroughly review the required background materials. Make sure you fully understand both the basic concepts as well as how to calculate payback period, NPV, IRR, and WACC. Submit your answers in a Word document. Make sure to show your work for all quantitative questions and fully explain your answers using references to the background readings for any conceptual questions. Questions 1 and 2 will require Excel. Attach an Excel file to show your computations for Questions 1 and 2.  

Case Assignment

  1. The table below gives the initial investment and expected cash flows over the next five years for two different projects. Assume that the industry you are in expects a return of 10%, which you use as the discount rate in net present value (NPV) calculations and as the required rate of return for purposes of deciding on projects. Also, assume that management only wants to invest in projects that pay off within four years.

For each project, compute the payback period, NPV, and internal rate of return (IRR). Then explain whether each project should be accepted based on these three criteria.

 

Project A

Project B

Initial Investment

$40,000

$28,000

Year

Cash Flows

1

$10,000

$10,000

2

$10,000

$13,000

3

$10,000

$5,000

4

$10,000

$5,000

5

$10,000

$6,000

  1. Suppose you are planning on becoming a vendor at the arena where your favorite sports team plays. You are trying to decide between opening up a souvenir stand selling T-shirts, caps, etc., with your sports team’s logo or opening up a hot dog and beer stand. It is more expensive to open up the hot dog and beer stand because you need to purchase a license to serve alcohol and you need to spend money to comply with health department regulations. Revenue from the souvenir stand is likely to be unpredictable because fans of your favorite team tend to want to purchase hats and T-shirts only when the team is winning. Revenue from hot dogs and beer seem to be a little more steady since fans want to eat and drink regardless of whether the team is winning.
    Below is a table with the initial investment cost of each type of stand and the annual payments you expect over the next five years. The annual payments will be different depending on how well your team does. Therefore, you will estimate how much cash flow you will get depending on whether your team does better than expected (optimistic), the same as the past few years (most likely), and worse than expected (pessimistic). Use a discount rate of 8%.

Based on the table below, answer the following items:

  1. Calculate the net present value (NPV) for each type of stand under each of the three scenarios. Calculate the range of possible NPV values for each type of stand.

  2. Based on your answer to A) above and your own guesses about how well you think your favorite team will do over the next five years, which type of stand would you rather invest in?

 

Souvenir Stand

Hot Dog and Beer Stand

Initial Investment

$100,000

$150,000

 

 Annual Cash Inflows (5 Years)

Outcome

 

 

 Pessimistic

$30,000

$50,000

 Most likely

$50,000

$60,000

 Optimistic

$70,000

$70,000

  1. Suppose you are a corn farmer in your home state. You have to decide between two projects. One project is to purchase new equipment for your farm that will help boost your profits for the next 10 years. You also find out that you can purchase a large banana farm in Brazil for the same price as the equipment, and at the current market price for bananas you will make a lot more profit than you would from purchasing new corn farming equipment.
    After asking around, you find out that the standard discount rate for evaluating the NPV of the farming project is 6%. Most farmers in your home state seem to use this rate successfully. However, you don’t know any other banana farmers and you don’t know too much about farming in Brazil, so you have to make a guess on an appropriate discount rate for the Brazilian banana farm. Based on the concepts from the background readings, would you say the Brazilian banana farm will need a lower or higher discount rate? A lot larger or smaller, or only a little?

  1. Calculate the following:

    1. The cost of equity if the risk-free rate is 2%, the market risk premium is 8%, and the beta for the company is 1.3.

    2. The cost of equity if the company paid a dividend of $2 last year and is expected to grow at a constant rate of 7%. The stock price is currently $40.

    3. The weighted average cost of capital (WACC) if the company has a total value of $1 million with a market value of its debt at $600,000 and a market value of its equity at $400,000. Its cost of debt is 6% and its cost of equity is 15%. The tax rate it pays is 25%.

  2. Suppose you own a chain of dry cleaners and the WACC you’ve been using to make decisions on new purchases of dry cleaning equipment is a steady 9%. Recently, gambling has been made legal in your home town so you decide to expand and open up a casino. Should you use the same WACC to evaluate purchases of casino equipment? Why or why not? What are some alternatives to using the same WACC to make decisions on casino equipment? Explain your reasoning and make references to concepts from the background readings.  

Assignment Expectations

  • Answer the assignment questions directly.

  • Stay focused on the precise assignment questions. Do not go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials.

  • For computational problems, make sure to show your work and explain your steps.

Module 3 SLP:

Module 3 - SLP

Capital Budgeting and the Cost of Capital

For your Module 3 SLP assignment, continue to do research on the company that you wrote about for Modules 1 and 2. For this assignment, you will be estimating the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) for your chosen company. The final calculation will be fairly straightforward, as it involves just plugging in some numbers into an equation. However, the more challenging task will be finding the necessary numbers to plug into the formulas. You will need information such as the beta for your company, the bond-rating, and various information from its balance sheet. Links to some suggested Web pages for finding this kind of information is included in the instructions, but you might be able to find other sources of information. Go step by step and present your information for Steps 1-4 below in a Word document. Make sure to show all of your steps one by one and include the sources of your information:

  1. Find out your chosen company's credit rating. Rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s assign ratings to companies. AAA is high, AA is lower, BBB is even lower, etc. The higher the rating, the lower the cost of debt capital. Explain what your company’s credit rating is and the reasons for the high or low rating based on your research. Also, use the Fidelity Fixed Income Web page to find out what the current return is for a 30-year bond for a corporation with the rating that your company has. This yield will be the approximate cost of debt capital for your company. We will call the cost of debt RD.

  2. Now estimate the cost of equity for your company. First you will need the beta; you already found this for your Module 1 SLP. You will also need the three-month treasury bill yield, which we will use as our measure of the risk-free rate. This rate should be listed on the Fidelity Fixed Income Web page linked above. Finally, you will need the equity risk premium. You can find estimates of this on many Web pages including Fidelity Fixed Income or Gutenberg Research. It is usually around 5%. Once you have this information, you can estimate the cost of equity as the 30-year treasury bill yield rate plus beta multiplied by the equity premium:
    Cost of Equity = risk-free rate + Beta * (Equity Premium).
    Show your calculations. We will call the cost of equity RE.

  1. Now find out how much of the firm's capital is equity and how much is debt. For the total value, look at the balance sheet for your company as found on Google Finance or a similar Web page. The total value of your company will be “total liabilities and shareholder’s equity.” The proportion of debt will be total liabilities divided by total value, which we will call D/V. The proportion of equity will be shareholder’s equity divided by total value, or E/V. If you calculate them correctly, the proportions will add up to one.

  2. Now we have all the information we need to get at least a rough ballpark estimate of WACC. Let’s assume a corporate tax rate of 35%. So the formula we will use is WACC = (E/V)* RE +(D/V)* RD *(1-.35)
    Calculate WACC and show your computations. As a “reality check” on your calculations, the WACC should likely be in the single digits and positive. Compare what you found to the average WACC in your company’s industry, which should be available on Web pages such as Cost of Capital by Sector (US). Note that 35% is the official corporate tax rate, but many corporations find tax breaks. If your WACC is too low, try computing it with a lower tax rate such as 25% or 10%.  

SLP Assignment Expectations

  • Answer the assignment questions directly.

  • Stay focused on the precise assignment questions. Do not go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials.

  • For computational problems, make sure to show your work and explain your steps.