Weighted average cost of capital

The weighted average cost of capital (WACC) is the rate that a company is expected to pay on average to all its security holders to finance its assets.

The WACC is the minimum return that a company must earn on existing asset base to satisfy its creditors, owners, and other providers of capital, or they will invest elsewhere. Companies raise money from a number of sources: common equity, preferred equity, straight debt, convertible debt, exchangeable debt, warrants, options, pension liabilities, executive stock options, governmental subsidies, and so on. Different securities are expected to generate different returns. The WACC is calculated taking into account the relative weights of each component of the capital structure and is used to see if the investment is worthwhile to undertake.

Calculation of WACC for a company with a complex capital structure is a laborious exercise.

The formula for a simple case

In a simple case where the company is financed by homogeneous equity and debt, the weighted average cost of capital can be found through:

${\text{WACC}}=({E \over {D+E}})\cdot y+({D \over {D+E}})\cdot d(1-t_{C})$, where $\ y=t_{R}+t_{P}\cdot B$, where:

Symbol	Meaning	Units
$\ y\$	required or expected rate of return on equity, or cost of equity	%
$\ d$	required or expected rate of return on borrowings before taxes	%
$\ t_{R}$	risk free rate	%
$\ t_{P}$	risk premium rate	%
$\ B$	Beta	-
$\ t_{C}$	corporate tax rate	%
$\ D$	total debt and leases (including current portion of long-term debt and notes payable)	currency
$\ E$	total market value of equity and equity equivalents or market cap (number of shares outstanding X share price)	currency
$\ K$	total capital invested in the going concern	currency

Sources of information

How do we find out the values of the components in the formula for WACC? First let us note that the "weight" of a source of financing is simply the market value (MV) of that piece divided by the sum of the values of all the pieces. For example, the weight of common equity in the above formula would be determined as follows:

${\text{Weight of common equity}}={\dfrac {\text{MV of common equity}}{{\text{MV of common equity}}+{\text{MV of debt}}+{\text{MV of preferred equity}}}}$

So, let us proceed in finding the market values of each source of financing (namely the debt, preferred stock, and common stock).

• The market value for equity for a publicly traded company is simply the price per share multiplied by the number of shares outstanding, and tends to be the easiest component to find.

• The market value of the debt is easily found if the company has publicly traded bonds. Frequently, companies also have a significant amount of bank loans, whose market value is not easily found. However, since the market value of debt tends to be pretty close to the book value (for companies that have not experienced significant changes in credit rating, at least), the book value of debt is usually used in the WACC formula.

• The market value of preferred stock is again usually easily found on the market, and determined by multiplying the cost per share by number of shares outstanding.

Now, let us take care of the costs.

• Preferred equity is equivalent to a perpetuity, where the holder is entitled to fixed payments forever. Thus the cost is determined by dividing the periodic payment by the price of the preferred stock, in percentage terms.

• The cost of common equity is usually determined using the capital asset pricing model.

• The cost of debt is the yield to maturity on the publicly traded bonds of the company. Failing availability of that, the rates of interest charged by the banks on recent loans to the company would also serve as a good cost of debt. Since a corporation normally can write off taxes on the interest it pays on the debt, however, the cost of debt is further reduced by the tax rate that the corporation is subject to. Thus, the cost of debt for a company becomes (YTM on bonds or interest on loans) × (1 − tax rate). In fact, the tax deduction is usually kept in the formula for WACC, rather than being rolled up into cost of debt, as such:

WACC = weight of preferred equity × cost of preferred equity

+ weight of common equity × cost of common equity

+ weight of debt × cost of debt × (1 − tax rate).

And now we are ready to plug all our data into the WACC formula.

References

• G. Bennet Stewart III (1991). The Quest for Value. HarperCollins.
• F. Modigliani and M. Miller, "The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment," American Economic Review (June 1958).
• M. Miller and F. Modigliani. "Corporate income taxes and the cost of capital: a correction." American Economic Review, 53 (3) (1963), pp. 433-443.
• J. Miles und J. Ezzell. "The weighted average cost of capital, perfect capital markets and project life: a clarification." Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 15 (1980), S. 719-730.

See also

• Beta coefficient
• Cost of capital
• Discounted cash flow
• Economic Value Added
• Internal rate of return
• Minimum acceptable rate of return
• Modigliani-Miller theorem
• Net present value
• Opportunity cost

External links

• Video about practical application of the WACC approach
• Yee, Kenton K., "Earnings Quality and the Equity Risk Premium: A Benchmark Model" . Contemporary Accounting Research, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 833-877, Fall 2006. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=921914.
• Velez-Pareja, Ignacio and Tham, Joseph, "A Note on the Weighted Average Cost of Capital WACC" (August 7, 2005). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=254587. Unpublished.
• WACC calculator Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
• A more realistic valuation: APV and WACC with constant book leverage ratio
• calculate the firm's Weighted Average Cost of Capital to publicly traded stock (only with the ticker symbol)
• calculate the WACC with your own values to understand the equation
• Find the WACC of any publicly traded company by entering the firm's stock ticker symbol
• Paper describing a method for generating the WACC curve when there is default risk - spreadsheet available