EBIT or EBITDA

Hi guys,

I'm trying to learn some basic IB technicals and was really hoping for help with a few concepts please:

  1. Isn't it better to value a company using EBIT rather than EBITDA because EBIT accounts for DA which is significant expense on the income statement?

  2. Do people in investment banks sometimes value a company by applying a multiples to EBIT rather than EBITDA?

  3. When should you use P/E, EV/EBITDA and EV/EBIT multiples?

  4. If you multiply EBITDA by a P/E multiple, would you still get the Enterprise Value or would you get equity value?

Thank you!

7 Comments
 

Both are good metrics though EBITDA is definitely more commonly used. Reason being:

  1. it's closer to real FCF
  2. It doesn't care if you need to or have invested in CAPEX, since it's pre D&A.
  3. it's more industry agnostic since EBITDA doesn't care about your non-cash expenses.

EBIT is helpful if say a tech firm is capitalizing salary costs as amort. or if a mining company owns equipment instead of renting.

 

Thanks, makes sense. I read somewhere that you tend to use EV/EBITDA for more capital intensive sectors like automative sector for example because it doesn't account for D&A.

Also, just another quick q please: For trading comps, would you apply a P/E ratio to Net Income or Earnings (and not EBITDA) as P/E is dependent on capital structure unlike EBITDA. And this would give you the equity value of the company. Similarly, you would apply an EV/EBITDA multiple to EBITDA and get the Enterprise Value.

Thanks so much!

 
Best Response

Food For Thought

1.

It amazes me how widespread the use of EBITDA has become. People try to dress up financial statements with it.
We won’t buy into companies where someone’s talking about EBITDA. If you look at all companies, and split them into companies that use EBITDA as a metric and those that don’t, I suspect you’ll find a lot more fraud in the former group. Look at companies like Wal-Mart, GE and Microsoft — they’ll never use EBITDA in their annual report.”
Does management think the tooth fairy pays for capital expenditures?

-Warren Buffett

 

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