Transaction comps are by definition historical. So we don't have forecast earnings for these companies A, because that information isn't available number one. B, if it's a private company, there would be no forecast information. So we have this list. It's not great, it's not perfect. But we do have some metrics for the M&A market. Now the good news is it's is that if you're an analyst and someone says, can you do the deal comps? Usually if anyone has done the deal comps previously, you don't need to redo the whole lot because these don't go, you don't need to update the share price because actually it's the acquisition price and that doesn't change. What you'll need to do is add the more recent transactions into the list. So if the list has already been done, actually it's not a big job. You just need to add in the two or three more recent deals that have happened since the last time of the analysis. And you can see in our list, we've got a nice range from 2018 through to 2023, in fact. Yeah, including the Dr. Pepper deal because these are using multiples based on historical earnings or LTM revenue and LTM EBITDA. We need to pull those metrics in for Red Bull first. So I'm ging to go and pull the Red Bull revenue in the historical 2023 year from the model. So if I go to the income statement, I'm want to get total revenue in the 2023 year, which I get as 10,554. And then I'm going to do the same thing with EBITDA.

Go down and get EBITDA in the 2023 year and then I can calculate the LTM margin. And just like trading comps, it's quite useful to put the company in context of the transaction peer group based on margins. It would be nice to do that based on growth rates, but usually you just don't have that level of information for the historical transactions because these, the transactions that happened historically and often if they're private companies, there's very, very limited information. Sometimes there's no information for deals that have been done that are private Here, what we can do is we can look at the LTM EBITDA of the peer group based on the minimum.

And I'll go to the LTM EBITDA multiple here. We've got EV of LTM EBITDA and that's a range. So we've got the minimum there.

And unfortunately we've got this Vital Pharmaceuticals, it's such a low multiple that I'm actually going to exclude it. It will really distort our numbers. So I'm just going to remove that.

If in a presentation, if you included that, it would just be so distorting, it would mean it would be a very difficult story to tell with that in there. So I've gotten the minimum. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the maximum, because I want to get a range here and I'll go to the right and I'll get the maximum multiple using a max. And then I can do a median as well.

I like to use medians rather than averages because that, again, doesn't get distorted by outliers. And that's pretty common. So we've got a range here for about 16 times to about 25 times. And the implied enterprise value would be EBITDA, absolute reference at multiplied by the multiple. And I've got my range of values for Red Bull based on what we think somebody in the M&A market would pay for of around 50 to 77 billion. Now that's a very wide range. That's a little, a little difficult to say. Well, you can pay between 50 and nearly 80 billion. That's too wide. So you'd need to articulate in the context of where you think Red Bull will sit. And what I then would do is also look at the trading comps. And if you look at the trading comps, where they sit in terms of an LTM multiple, you can see that Monster is trading at a 29 times LTM multiple. So if I was the owner of Red Bull, I would laugh in your face if you said, well, we're gonna pay 25 times LTM EBITDA. And you're probably thinking, well, why are the transaction comps lower than the trading comps? Well, there's a couple of issues here. Firstly, the list of transaction comps don't really reflect acquisitions of companies of the level of quality. And when I say quality, I mean growth rates and margins of Monster and Red Bull. They're just not as strong companies in terms of their business model, market domination, and global brand value. So that's the first issue. We don't really have a comparable transaction that is good to sit alongside what we pay for Red Bull. That's the first issue. The second issue is that in the past few years, the US stock markets in particular have been rerated upward. And what I mean by that is that the multiple, the market multiple over the last few years has gone up. So investors are paying more for each dollar of earnings in recent years than they were in prior years. And because these transaction comparables are historical, by definition, they are reflecting asset prices, not today, but paid for in historical years. So if the equity markets have risen, that means asset prices as a whole will have risen, and these historical transactions are not kind of keeping up with today's asset values. So those are the two reasons why when we are looking at Red Bull, it's hard to value Red Bull in the context of these deals. A, because none of those deals are really truly comparable to the quality of Red Bull. And B, a lot of these deals were done in years when asset prices were significantly lower.