![]() Once again, to arrive at the solution, focus on value creation: Why does the team believe that the cost of capital is higher for investing in business 2? With a 5 percent risk premium and similar leverage, the 2 percent difference in weighted average cost of capital (WACC) comes from a 0.4 difference in (levered) beta, which is relatively large. However, the difference in the cost of capital drives the multiple for investing in business 2 below that of investing in business 1. Investing in business 2, at the same cost of capital, would indeed lead to a higher multiple. ![]() It turns out that this counterintuitive outcome results from a subtle interplay between growth, return on capital, and cost of capital. The details surprise you: at the same growth and the same investment, business 2 has a higher ROIC but a lower multiple. Could that potential be driven by fundamental differences in ROIC? At the same growth, a business with higher ROIC should have a higher multiple (Exhibit 2). However, business 1 seems to have potential for a higher multiple. Again, your team has come up with two proposals for investing the next $100 million.īoth potential expansions grow at around 2 percent. In the next strategic cycle, the board asks you to investigate value creation by expanding the core business. The challenge of investing outside the core This will enable a robust discussion on achieving greater value creation as opposed to splashier, higher-multiple headlines. To avoid this trap, you should always identify the total value created, as well as the underlying growth and return on capital that drive value. For instance, a software company or other asset-light business with a relatively high multiple can hesitate to invest in strategically important assets that have a lower multiple (for example, a leasing business or data centers), even if doing so would create positive net present value (NPV). Yet something like it occurs quite often. This option has a higher return on capital (measured as earnings divided by the investment needed) than strategy 1 and maximizes long-term value, which, from a shareholders’ perspective, is paramount. Doing so shrinks the multiple, but it also creates more absolute shareholder value. It looks like a win-win-win.Ī junior colleague, however, proposes strategy 2: deploy all the excess cash into a lower-multiple business. That’s awfully tempting: strategy 1 generates value, produces a higher multiple, and enables buybacks. Executing on strategy 1 would expand your company’s EV/NOPAT multiple of core operations (that is, the multiple, adjusted for cash holdings, observed today by investors) to 16.4. Therefore, the stock buyback has no impact on the value of the core business, and the fair value of the growth businesses reflects all future growth opportunities. 1 We assume, for purposes of this example, that all assets and companies are fairly valued. Your team is excited about strategy 1, which involves an investment of $100 million to grow a new, high-multiple business, which requires less capital, leaving $200 million to buy back shares. You are faced with the choices in Exhibit 1. You understand that the company should invest for growth a board member suggests more share repurchases in order to “stabilize the price.” For purposes of this example, the company also has $300 million of excess cash, and $9 million of posttax earnings, which leads to an observed market multiple of 16.5. ![]() The current core business generates net operating profit after taxes (NOPAT) of $100 million the EV-to-NOPAT multiple is therefore 15. Imagine you are the CEO of a company with an enterprise value (EV), excluding excess cash, of $1.5 billion. The ‘higher multiple’ trapĪ higher multiple is a head turner. In particular, there are three instances when an overreliance on multiples can contribute to poor strategic decisions in capital allocation: (1) prioritizing multiples when investments at a lower multiple could generate more value (2) ignoring the interplay between multiples, returns on capital, and cost of capital when allocating capital to a noncore business and (3) extrapolating from a start-up’s results when determining a conglomerate’s potential for value creation. Sometimes companies miss this essential point. Multiples are the result of good outcomes, but they are not the primary objective.
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