DCF Case Study - Invested Capital
- 04:55
Calculate key performance ratios, invested capital, return on invested capital, and return on new capital invested for a company like Red Bull, using a financial model.
Transcript
Once we've done the key performance ratios like revenue growth, EBIT margin and cash conversion ratio, we now need to take a look at the invested capital. And the aim here is to understand that as a company starts a slow growth that's usually caused by a lowering of the return on investor capital, and specifically not just the average investor capital, but the incremental return on the incremental investment. And we measure that by something called return on new capital invested. We'll start by just calculating the investor capital. And the easiest way of doing this is just looking at what investors have given the business. But this is using using book values. So we'll take net debt plus shareholders equity. I'll go to the balance sheet in the 2023 year on the Red Bull model. So I'm going to take the revolver balance, I'm gonna add the long-term debt balance. I'm going to subtract cash. I should also subtract any financial assets too, and I'll add the shareholders' equity, and that would be my invested capital balance. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to just calculate how fast that is growing. So if I just copy this to the right and then I can calculate the implied growth rate and copy that to the right, and we should start to see as the overall revenue starts to slow in growth, the invested capital also starts to slow. And actually really what's going on here is that the returns, as they fall, investors start to say this is less attractive as an industry and therefore will allocate less capital. So supply doesn't expand as fast, and that reduces the overall industry growth rate. And you can see by the end of the forecast period, our invested capital is only growing by 3%. So the return on investor capital, we take the NOPAT number, which is net operating profit after tax divided by the average of last year and this year's investor capital. Now the problem with a company like Red Bull is that because of the intangible assets in the brand of Red Bull and all the marketing spend that goes into the creation of those intangible assets, the return on invested capital is a crazily high number in comparison to the cost of capital or a WACC calculation. And you often find that with companies with huge amounts of intangible assets that are not on the balance sheet. So what we're really doing is looking at the trend in this number, and we should normally expect it to decline as the growth slows because the decline in the returns are causing that growth to slow. The next item is to do the return on new capital invested. And what we're looking at here is we're looking at the incremental growth and NOPAT versus the incremental investment in the business. So I'll start by taking the 2024 NOPAT number, and I'll subtract the 2023 NOPAT numbers. So you can see that there's been an increase in profits. Well then we want to do is divide that by the increase in the invested capital. So we are trying to measure for that investment how much increase in the profitability did we get, and that will kind of give us a return on the investment. So you can see the incremental return in 2024 is 20%. And this is the key because imagine you're McDonald's, you will keep opening branches until the incremental return of the next dollar invested is closed to your cost of capital. Now again, it's a bit messy for a company like this because you can see that we have got a really high return on new capital invested, but it's the trend and it's fallen in 26 from 88.8% down to 51.7%. So it's the trend that we're really interested in. You sometimes at the beginning get a little bumpiness as the asset efficiency ratios stabilize. So I'm going to ignore these couple of years, but those gives us a good overview of the returns and the forecast does make sense because our returns are falling, our investments slowing, and our growth in revenues is slowing as well. So that makes a coherent story.