Finding Growth Rate from Financial Statements

Hi WSO,

I am working on a modeling assignment for school, which is based on Harvard Business School case studies. This one in particular is the Men's Wearhouse/Jos. A Banks merger model. I am only provided income statement/balance sheet for both, multiples from comparable companies, and risk-free/beta/risk premium chart.

The information that I have is from 2011-2014. Certain balance sheet items such as prepaid expenses, PP & E, depreciation, and notes payable are not provided for the final year (2014).

My TWO questions are: how do I calculate a growth rate for each firm, and do I calculate the missing metrics as a projection, or will they be insignificant in the grand scheme of the model?

This is my first real financial model where I need to figure everything out and key information is not given.

Thanks in advance!

2 Comments
 

Can you specify what you're trying to find? If you're looking for YoY growth rate of revenue, earnings, etc. I hope I don't have to tell you how to find that (this years revenue - last year's revenue/last year's revenue). Projecting out stuff like PP&E, depreciation, etc. can be done by either looking at historical projections or by using another value's growth as a proxy. Either one is acceptable I think.

 
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