Discounted Dividend Model
- 05:31
Understand how to model a discounted dividend valuation for a property and casualty insurance company
Transcript
So now we're going to do a valuation of direct line and we're going to do a discounted dividend model. So we've got an assumption for the growth rate in dividends. Now that really shouldn't be anything more than nominal GDP. In fact, probably less than that because this is just a very, very mature industry and we wouldn't expect it to be as high as the overall GDP of the country as new industries credited out. So it's almost tempting to perhaps even say reduce that to say 2% because the the GDP growth is probably likely to be higher than that. Then we've got risk-free rate which is the 10 year government bond in the country that you're doing the analysis assuming that it's a mature and developed country. And then we've got a risk premium in this case of 7%. And then we've got a beta of 0.87 and that can be three to five year levered beta. So if we calculate the cost of equity we'll start with the risk we rate we'll add the equity risk premium and then we'll multiply by beta and that will give our discount rate of in this case about 8%. And then we're going to take the dividends which we forecast above. So we come up and we get the base calculation for the dividends and we'll come up to the top in the equity section and we have the dividends times minus one to make it a positive 'cause that's the dividend stream we're going to get as investors. And then what we'll do is we will discount that. But before we do, we'll calculate the terminal value. And we're gonna do is a Gordon growth model. So we'll take the last year's dividend multiplied by one plus the long-term growth rate in dividends which we just adjusted to 2%. And then we will divide that by the cost of equity 8.9% minus the growth rate in dividends. And that's the standard Gordon growth model and that's the value of the business after the forecast period. So the total cash flows are gonna be the sum of those two items. And I'll copy that back because this is the stream that I'm discounting. Now, if you were owning an insurance company as a private business, you could arguably take out the dividends whenever you wanted. In fact, you could dividend announce spare capital every single day. So you could in that case assume a midyear adjustment. In other words, you on average receive the dividends in the middle of the year, not the year end. But as a public company you are gonna get paid the dividends when the company decides to do that. So you'll have an interim dividend halfway through the year and a final dividend at year end. And usually the final dividend is larger. So I'm going to, for simplicity, just use the standard MPV formula, which is going to implicitly assume the dividends are paid at year end. So I'm firstly gonna take the cost of equity and then I'm gonna present value the future cash flows back to today. And that will give me my equity value. I'll divide that by the shares outstanding and I will get my implied share price in this case of five pounds 30. And then I can calculate an implied LTM PE multiple. And I don't have a earnings per share so I'm just gonna use the equity value divided by the net income in the historical year in this case. And we get a PE multiple of about 15 times, to (indistinct) is a little under that. And that's probably partly because in a dividend discount model, the market probably leaves a little bit on the table. They're not completely sure that those dividends will come through. Now the one thing about this model we've been slightly aggressive on, if we take a look at the return on equity. Now the return on equity is a really key metric for insurance companies because it correlates strongly with the price to book value multiple. So the higher return on equity you get the higher price to book value multiple you should get as well. So if I come down to the bottom now and I'll just take the net income divided by the average equity, I get 16%. And you can see that that doesn't change very much over time. In fact, it goes up a little bit by the end and there's no cycle. Also and probably more critically if we look at the combined ratio, the combined ratio is under 100% right the way through the forecast. In fact, it's improved a little bit. So one of the reasons why we're probably above the market price is because we've got a very aggressive combined ratio. But let's see what happens if we just tweak that a little bit. So the ratio that will probably change is going to be the gross claims ratio. So in this case, if this increases slightly let's assume that it increases to perhaps 65%. So that's a significant increase. In other words your expected losses are going to be much more. And you can see the combined ratio has jumped you'll see a direct hit to the valuation particularly 'cause it's affecting the terminal value multiple. So again, we've got down to about 10.8 times as a PE multiple, which is probably more about where the company's trading currently. But that gives you just an indication of the dividend discount model for direct line.