wacc or internal required rate for private company

I was just wondering how do you calculate wacc or any other discount rates for a private company with NO DEBT at all? The company has been in business for over 10++ years and somehow they have managed to do well with zero debts, how do you calculate wacc or return on equity to be used for the evaluation of capital budgeting projects?

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Best Response

If it's for the evaluation of capital budgetint projects, the overall, current, company's net debt does not matter. What matters is how you're gonna finance those projects.

Capital structure: assume target capital structure for that particular project (if it's zero debt, it's fine) Cost of equity: traditional CAPM, and then apply premiums based on specific risk attributes (size of the project, etc.) Cost of debt (if any): expected before tax cost of debt

If the cash-flows you're gonna discount are not in a strong currency, then apply an inflation differential to the previously calculated discount rate.

 

I tend to think about the capital structure as ideal leverage for long term optimization. For example, if companies in the comp set should be ideally levered to 2.5x, then you can use that to determine debt sizing - even for companies that currently do not have that leverage ratio.

 

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