In the Introduction, I mentioned that future estimates of a company’s profitability are inherently inaccurate because nobody truly knows what will happen in the future. Additionally, the farther into the future you try to guess, the less accurate your guesses will generally be. To compensate for this, financial analysts use the previously noted Time Value of Money principle to “discount” future Free Cash Flow (which we found in the last section). Discounting means that if we want to use future profits to determine the company’s value today, we have to make those profits less valuable because there is a chance the company won’t actually earn those profits in the future.
So the next question is: How much less should future cash flow be worth?
The common technique in finance is to apply a “Discount Factor” or “Discount Rate” to decrease the future cash flows.
The Discount Rate is an annual interest rate, except instead of going forward in time, you’re going backward in time from the future to the present (also known as the Present Value formula). The Present Value formula is:
In our Gamestop model below, we find the Present Value for every year into the future we have found Free Cash Flow (“Present Value of FCF” in the spreadsheet). “N” is how many years into the future.
What do we use as the discount rate (“r” in the equation)? This is where we use the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC). A longer definition is in the Glossary, but the WACC represents the minimum expected rate of return an investor in the company would expect the company to earn with the investor’s money. Therefore, discounting by the investor’s minimum expected investment return turns future profits into their present value based on investor expectations.
How do we determine what the WACC should be?
There are some different ways to determine the WACC. In my case, I tried initially to find Gamestop’s WACC using data from similar companies, but the value this produced was too low. You can see this work if you download the Excel workbook and view the “WACC” spreadsheet. The lower the WACC, the higher the stock price, since you are discounting or decreasing the cash flows by this rate. So I manually set the WACC at 8% in the model, which seemed realistically fair.
Applying the Present Value formula onto each future year’s FCF gives us the “Present Value of Free Cash Flow” row in the Excel model.
Finding Enterprise Value:
With the knowledge of what the company’s future profits are worth to us today, we can determine how much the company is worth. The company’s value is called the “Enterprise Value”. Again, a longer definition of Enterprise Value is in the Glossary. Here we can define the Enterprise Value as the sum of the Present Value of Free Cash Flows (in the spreadsheet as “Cumulative Present Value of FCF”) plus the Terminal Value.
The Terminal Value represents the value of the company for all the years beyond our model combined into one amount. This can be determined in different ways. In my model I chose to use the “Perpetuity Growth Method.” Simply put, this takes the last year’s Free Cash Flow in the model and grows it at a small rate indefinitely into the future and then discounting it back to its present value. The Terminal Value requires choosing a “perpetual growth rate”, also known as the rate at which the company will grow forever into the future. This percentage should be low as it’s impossible for company to grow faster than the entire economy forever. For Gamestop, I chose a one percent perpetual growth rate. Based on the Thesis and Supporting Arguments, I do not believe the company will grow very fast in the future, but I did not choose zero growth to keep my model a little more conservative and assume that Gamestop will not go completely bankrupt.
Adding the Cumulative Present Value of FCF and the Terminal Value gives us the Enterprise Value. Congratulations, you have now found the value for the entire company! In my model, I determined that the entire Gamestop company is worth approximately $2.357 billion.
The Final Steps – Finding the Stock Price:
Next we will take the value of the company and determine how much each share of stock gets of that value. Adding the Enterprise Value plus the company’s cash gives us the Equity Value, which is the value of the company which belongs to the shareholders. Gamestop has $635 million of cash in the bank, so added onto the Enterprise Value gives Gamestop an Equity Value of $3.006 billion.
The formula for the stock price is:
Stock Price=Equity Value/Fully Diluted Shares Outstanding
Fully Diluted Shares Outstanding is the number of all the company’s stock. To reiterate in English, the stock price is the total value of the company and its cash divided by the total number of shares of stock that exist. FDSO is the “Shares Outstanding” (shares available in the market) plus new shares of stock that can be created by stock options in owned by the company and its employees.
Gamestop has 126.4 million shares of stock.
Take Gamestop’s $3.006 billion in Equity Value divided by its 126.4 million shares and you find that every share of stock is worth $23.78.
Next: Extending the Research
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Logan Frederick 