Pascal edited introduction.tex  almost 8 years ago

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\\ Drawbacks of the dividend or earnings approach to valuation are well known. For example, earnings are a pure accounting measure that can be manipulated because it incorporates non-cash items of the income statement. Another drawback often mentioned by practitioners is that profitability measures based on earnings depend on a firm's gearing, defined as the amount of debt relative to equity. A company can have an attractive \textit{ROE} despite having an unattractive Return on Invested Capital (hereafter \textit{ROIC}). More importantly, a company using financial leverage to enhance its \textit{ROE} actually makes it more volatile often at the expense of its financial strength (measured by the health of the balance sheet). For these reasons, practitioners in the equity investment community tend to prefer cash-flow based valuation metrics.  \\  \\ The purpose of this working paper is to show that it is perfectly feasable to adapt the Profitatbiliy-Valuation framework so as to hinge it on a firm's cash-flows instead of earnings. Using cash-flows has several advantages: first of all, it allows us to avoid the debt caveat. Secondly, by using cash-flows when valuing a firm, practitioners adopt a more entrepreneurial attitude towards stock valuation; typically, a private equity firm or any type of firm that wishes to value a potential target will do so by discounting cash-flows instead of earnings or dividends.  \\  \\The paper is organised as follow. First section recapitulates Pierre and al. theory behind  $V_{t}=\displaystyle\sum_{i=1}^{K}\frac{C_{t+i}}{(1+R)^i}+V_{t+K}$