Essay about Marriott Case Study Harvavd Business Review

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.

Based on the suggestion that the focus should be on market values, compute the weights of debt, preferred stock, and common stock.

Calculating a firm’s cost of capital has always been a key issue in financial management. To tackle this issue, WACC is one of the most widely used formulas even though the process is difficult, and results seem ambiguous. However, it is clear that WACC is the average cost of capital the firm must pay, in this case Home Depot (HD), to all its investors, both debt and equity holders. Since HD has debt to the tune of $29.6 billion (2012), it means that rwacc is an average of its debt and equity cost of capital. Based on the limiting factors revealed on the page 5, our confidence level in HD’s WACC is moderate. Nevertheless, since HD’s WACC is 5.97% it means that the company should only invest in projects

So in order for the company to make a smart decision, they would have to use the WACC (weighted average cost of capital) in order to determine which way they would go about raising that additional capital, whether it be equity (shares of stocks) or debt (a bond issue).

In previous calculation, it already know the percent Debt is 34.4%, percent Equity is 65.6%, Cost of equity capital is 11.088% and in this case gives Marginal effective corporate tax rate is 35%. So it only just to calculate cost of Debt. The cost debt is the interest rate or yield that a firm must pay on its bonds. In this case, it uses weighted average yield to maturity to calculate cost of debt. Through the form of EXHIBIT 11 and using two column debt amount and yield to maturity to finance cost of debt is 5.286%, however, the appropriate cost of debt is the after-tax

The average tax rate is 0.3859. Our estimation for the firm’s after-tax cost of debt is about 2.25%. The analysis of the cost of debt is summarized in Appendix D.

The cost of debt is the effective rate that a company pays on its total debt.

b. How did you measure the cost of debt for each division? Should the debt cost differe across divisions? Why?

Lastly, the interest rate was calculated by dividing interest expense by long-term debt for the company. These numbers, along with equity and debt data given to us in the case, resulted in a WACC of 13.89%.

WACC calculations entailed several different steps prior to using the actual WACC formula. First, by using CPP’s balance sheet we identified its D/E, by dividing Debt portion by the Equity portion arriving at 2.07, than we calculated D/V – 0.67 and E/V – 0.33. Afterwards, we used comparable firm Wackenhut’s capital structure for our analysis and applied it to our calculations. Wackenhut’s capital structure consisted of 92% equity and 8% debt. Subsequently, we went through the Beta unlevering and then levering process using above capital structure. To unlever, we multiplied given beta of 0.89 by the debt portion of capital structure 0.92, than we relevered the Beta_e=(1+D/E 2.07) * unlevered Beta 0.82 = 2.51. Next step consisted of calculating R_e=R_f+beta_e*MRP= 8.6%(given)+2.51*7.5% (given)=27.41%.

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.

The next step is determined the Risk-free Rates, Risk Premiums and Betas for lodging and restaurant divisions in order to calculate the Cost of Equity for both divisions. After finding out the cost of debt and the debt for lodging and restaurant divisions, the cost of equity will follow.

To arrive at a total company value, or enterprise value, we simply have to take the present value of the cash flows and the Terminal value, divide them by the discount rate and, finally, add up the results. If we are discounting free cash flow of the firm at the weighted average cost of capital, this would give the value of the firm, so it would be necessary to deduct net debt in order to arrive at the equity value. In this report, simply use FCF in the year of 2011 to compare the value of the firm to the stock price in the year end of 2011.

*We calculated the cash flows of the firm and discounted them by our WACC, which was roughly 16%. We used a terminal growth rate of 6% (Exhibit 1)