Case Study Week 3 - Victoria Chemicals PLC
1. What changes, if any, should the plant manager (Morris) ask the financial controller (Greystock) to make to his analysis?
Morris should ask the Financial Controller to the make the following changes to his analysis:
• Include the cost of the rolling stock. These would become an essential asset of the Merseyside Works. The investment to occur in 2010 and then depreciated over the following 10 years. These would become an asset of the Merseyside works.
• Ignore the requests of the Director of Sales. The assumption is that Victoria Chemicals uses consolidated financial accounting in that they will consolidate the books of both Rotterdam and Merseyside. The impact of cannibalisation will be
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Therefore, £2m would need to be invested in 2010 to facilitate the additional volume. Depreciable life of 10years. This should be included in capital outlay. ii. Director of Sales
Cannibalisation of Rotterdam to get rid of excess at Mersey. Cannot take the approach of not undertaking appropriate investment projects if it disadvantages another division of the company. The individual operations have a responsibility to operate as efficiently as possible to return maximum value to the stakeholders. It is highly likely that any incremental business would come from other competing plants that have higher production costs. There is nothing to indicate that the upgrade would result in cannibalisation of the Rotterdam plant. Therefore this should not be a consideration. iii. Assistant plant manager (Tewitt) Proposed upgrade EPC plant. Investment required of £1m. Improve cash flow by £25k ad infinitum. However, NPV = -£750,000. Strategic advantages suggested by Tewitt resulting from the project, including increases in volume and prices when the recession ends, should be ignored. There is nothing to suggest that an increase in business would eventuate.
There is a clear conflict of interest with bonuses are linked to the size of the overall operation. This would bring into questions the motives for undertaking this project and could introduce some ethical issues.
This project would have the effect of diluting the return from the main plant upgrade as by itself
1. Using the excel spreadsheet provided, and the recommended consequential disclosures as a basis you your analysis, what recommendations would you give Phillips on each of the items listed below? In each case, justify your recommendations and estimate how much the decision will change the “true” value of the company and its value in the eyes of an investor in a private company.
Unlike the previous two cash flows where we considered them based on the direct impact they bring, the super project’s share of the building and agglomerator capacity must not be considered in our cash flow for the following reasons:
What is the net present value of this follow-up investment and the combined base and expansion investments?
Critically evaluate the assumptions on which your forecasts are based. What developments could alter your results? Is Mr. Cowins correct in his belief that Hampton can repay the loan in December?
4. Location of the new plant: 0 points. Here we would have to strongly consider if we could relocate the plant given that we could hire new workforce under completely new agreements. The biggest disadvantage that we have currently is that the workers are being overpaid, and reducing their salary would affect their
In this task I’m going to analyse the figures on cash flow that I created in P3 and justify why you think the business might have problems also provide range of solutions.
The investment requested is £12 million. Strategic and operating benefits were summarized in our previous memo to you. We have made, however, some changes to our investment analyses, which appear below.
* Investment in plant upgrades that provide the greatest benefit for each plant, which is most likely any of them except for plant upgrade: C.
This is beyond the company cost limit set of $16 million capital and $2.6 million yearly payment for improvement. The company is committed to keep the plant but at the basis on the cost limit set.
The upgrade of the Rotterdam plant involves implementing the Japanese technology and requires a capital expenditure of £8.0 million with £3.5 million spent today, £2.0 million on year one, £1.0 million on year two and £1.0 million on year three. This will also increase polypropylene output by 7% from current levels at a rate of 2.0% per year. In addition, gross margin will improve by 0.8% per year from 11.5% to 16.0%. After auditing the financial models, it is concluded that the static net present value of the upgrade is -£6.35 million using a discount rate of 10% and an expected inflation rate of 3% annually. The Rotterdam upgrade contains an option to switch to the speculated German technology being available in five years. The current value of the option is zero as it is deeply out-of-the-money. The total net present value of the upgrade is -£6.35 million. The incremental earnings per share of the upgrade is £ 0.0013, the payback period is 14.13 years, and the internal rate of return is 18.7%.
This assignment will analyse and compare the financial performance between NEXT and DEBENHAMS by examining their latest Annual Reports. In order to conclude and comment on these two businesses, appropriate ratios will be calculated through the figures in their business financial statements and the information regarding their industry and market conditions in Annual Reports will also be analysed.
The net present value (NPV) of each option has been calculated and included in Table 1, based on figures from the study group report. Unfortunately, these figures are flawed in the same manner as Wriston’s current performance and accounting mechanisms in that they don’t properly allocate revenue, nor do they recognize inherent manufacturing complexities. The plant closure option’s expected operational gain seems particularly suspect. A better valuation of the new plant options is perhaps
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 Transport Division believes that the cost of tank cars should be included in initial outlay of Merseyside Works capital programme. The director of ICG sales thinks that the recession will reduce the demand for polypropylene, and thus lead to an excess supply of polypropylene. To combat this, the firm will shift capacity from Rotterdam to Merseyside, and Merseyside will cannibalize Rotterdam.
The actual production would begin in the third quarter of this year, therefore only half year’s depreciation should be counted on Equipment and IT communication in 2004 (According to Appendix A). The following years (2005-2008) incremental cash flows are computed by the same method. However as the IT equipment and furnishings would be depreciated on a straight line basis over 3 years, thus in year four (2007), there would be only half a year’s deprecation left and after that it will be used up. The last year’s net cash flow in 2009 should be included the extra terminal Value on that year, which includes 24 years’ residual value on building and one year and a half residual value on equipment totaled $2,990,412 with two assumptions of by using residual book values for the building and operating equipment and there will be no further NWS advantage after year 2009. Finally, by obtaining 6 years’ incremental cash-flows and discounting them back to time zero (with the estimate rate of return by 15%) lessing initial cost to get an appealing NPV of $1190528 (Luehrman, p. 3).