Working Capital Liquidation Workout
- 02:48
Working Capital Liquidation Workout
Transcript
In this workout, we've got a company, Buyer Incorporated who's acquiring Target Limited. And we've got some information below. This is the enterprise value, the 300, which is the agreed cash free, debt free price, which is just the legal name for enterprise value. And the information from the accounts pre-offer had levels of cash of 50, debt of 100 and we assume that the average level of working capital in the business should be around 100. Now, sometime later at completion when we receive the completion accounts, we can see that the cash balance was as we expected, 50. And the debt balance is also as expected as 100. But the working capital you can see is zero. Now, normally, if a company's working capital liquidates, goes down to zero from 100 as it has done here, that would normally release cash. So we would, if there's no leakage expect a corresponding increase in the cash balance of 100. So the cash balance would be 150. And so if the cash was 150, then although the cash has gone up by 100 because the working capital has gone down, the buyer would be equal because the equity value would go up by 100 because of cash, but you'd have a working capital adjustment that would be a negative 100 and you'd be indifferent in that situation. But in this case, the cash hasn't changed, which actually probably means that the vendor who's selling the business has taken out the cash that has come from the working capital being liquidated. So the equity value and announcement in this case would be the 300 enterprise value. And then we would add on the balance of cash there and we'd subtract the balance of debt to get 250. The closing equity value is gonna still start with the underlying enterprise value. We'll assume that hasn't changed, and we'll add on the balance of cash and we'd subtract the balance of debt. But in this case, the working capital is lower than expected. In other words, the gas tank is empty. So we need to be compensated for that and we would reduce the price by the difference. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna add in parentheses the working capital actual balance minus the working capital average or permanent level of working capital, and what we should see here is that the closing equity value is less than the equity value and announcement reflecting that the working capital has liquidated and critically that the cash from that liquidation has left the business.