Please help with my DCF model...Not sure where I went wrong

Hey guys,

This is my first attempt at creating a DCF Model. For some reason my numbers are way too high. Target's share price is currently around $70 per share and my model shot out $511. Obviously my extremely high enterprise value is causing this but I cannot seem to find where I messed up.

Any help is greatly appreciated guys.

Attachment Size
target_dcf_model.xls 22.5 KB 22.5 KB
29 Comments
 

They are right. I just checked again on my comp and it seems your calculations are right. The terminal value is so high because the discount rate is so low - that seems to be the problem.

 

Think about it..... both costs are what the company "pays" to market to get equity or debt funding. Would you, as an investor, charge the same to all companies?

Every company has a different story and capital structure, so the numbers should be different. That doesn't meant they aren't KNOWN though. That's part art, part science. Cost of debt is observable by seeing where the debt trades (or where comps trade). Cost of equity is observed with CAPM (or not, as you saw with your model), with inverse of P/E, or with comps. The art is that if you are projecting a company that will evolve significantly as it ages,, perhaps you ought to adjust your costs for terminal value, as to reflect what you think the costs converge towards at t+N - makes sense?

 

1) Your WACC is low. Both cost of equity and debt is probably higher. My guess the WACC is closer to 5 or 6% (10% is too high though).

2) I suspect the biggest issue is cash impact below EBITDA (change in NWC or capex) since you're calculating your terminal value based on perpetuity growth. If the PV of your TV is that much higher than the PV of your FCF from the first 5 years, something is wrong. The ratio should be around 30:70 (give or take a little). Your current implied Exit EBITDA multiple is like 44x, which makes no sense. If you use an Exit Multiple of 8x (just arbitrary) for terminal value, your price per share comes down to like $100, which makes a lot more sense.

 
Best Response

The debt in your WACC calculations should be the market value of debt (what the bonds are currently trading at on the market) rather than book value (pulled from the balance sheet).

EBIT and EBITDA margins aren't calculated as margins in your spreadsheet...they're calculated as growth rates. Changing them to a % of revenue brings down the price per share dramatically. Right now, you're essentially assuming that although revenues will grow 2% per year, Target will be finding a way to cut costs by 10% each year for five years (a really aggressive assumption).

 

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but a quick spell check also revealed four spelling errors on common words that would jump out at a client. I'm not implying that this was a finished product and you wouldn't have spell checked it, but just something to keep in mind. I say that because I've made the mistake myself.

As a first year, I would get irritated about pedantic stuff like that, like who cares if I flipped the "i" and "e" in "receivables" while I was crunching numbers at midnight? Unfortunately, clients won't see it that way and it will be the one thing they remember about an otherwise solid presentation.

The thing that has always helped me is printing things and reviewing them on paper before I hit "send." For whatever reason, formatting and spelling errors jump out at me on paper, but I'll miss the same errors if I'm staring at them on a computer screen.

"Now youse can't leave." -Sonny LoSpecchio
 

If you adjust EBITDA and EBIT to be a % of revenue (I used the mean of the last three years, getting a 9.4% for EBITDA and 7.0% for EBIT), set D&A to be the difference between EBITDA and EBIT, put CapEx correctly into your model =(Old PP&E - D&A - New PP&E) (I know this becomes a negative CapEx, but you want it to be negative in the FCF bridge anyway) AND set the CoD to 5.0% and CoE to 8.9% (which you said are more realistic) you will get a share price of $70.79 which seems to be more in line with the current market price.

 

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