A Look At The Fair Value Of Balfour Beatty plc (LON:BBY)

Simply Wall St.

Wed, Dec 5, 2018, 2:27 AM

Does the December share price for Balfour Beatty plc (LON:BBY) reflect it’s really worth? Today, I will calculate the stock’s intrinsic value by taking the foreast future cash flows of the company and discounting them back to today’s value. I will use the Discounted Cash Flows (DCF) model. Don’t get put off by the jargon, the math behind it is actually quite straightforward. Anyone interested in learning a bit more about intrinsic value should have a read of the Simply Wall St analysis model. If you are reading this and its not December 2018 then I highly recommend you check out the latest calculation for Balfour Beatty by following the link below.

View our latest analysis for Balfour Beatty

Crunching the numbers

I use what is known as a 2-stage model, which simply means we have two different periods of varying growth rates for the company’s cash flows. Generally the first stage is higher growth, and the second stage is a more stable growth phase. To begin with we have to get estimates of the next five years of cash flows. For this I used the consensus of the analysts covering the stock, as you can see below. I then discount the sum of these cash flows to arrive at a present value estimate.

5-year cash flow estimate

	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Levered FCF (£, Millions)	£109.39	£115.40	£113.39	£111.42	£109.49
Source	Analyst x2	Analyst x2	Est @ -1.74%	Est @ -1.74%	Est @ -1.74%
Present Value Discounted @ 8.28%	£101.03	£98.43	£89.32	£81.06	£73.56

Present Value of 5-year Cash Flow (PVCF)= UK£443m

We now need to calculate the Terminal Value, which accounts for all the future cash flows after the five years. The Gordon Growth formula is used to calculate Terminal Value at an annual growth rate equal to the 10-year government bond rate of 1.4%. We discount this to today’s value at a cost of equity of 8.3%.

Terminal Value (TV) = FCF₂₀₂₂ × (1 + g) ÷ (r – g) = UK£109m × (1 + 1.4%) ÷ (8.3% – 1.4%) = UK£1.6b

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV) = TV / (1 + r)⁵ = UK£1.6b ÷ ( 1 + 8.3%)⁵ = UK£1.1b

The total value is the sum of cash flows for the next five years and the discounted terminal value, which results in the Total Equity Value, which in this case is UK£1.5b. The last step is to then divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. If the stock is an depositary receipt (represents a specified number of shares in a foreign corporation) then we use the equivalent number. This results in an intrinsic value of £2.25. Compared to the current share price of £2.38, the stock is fair value, maybe slightly overvalued at the time of writing.

LSE:BBY Intrinsic Value Export December 5th 18

The assumptions

I’d like to point out that the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate and of course the actual cash flows. If you don’t agree with my result, have a go at the calculation yourself and play with the assumptions. Because we are looking at Balfour Beatty as potential shareholders, the cost of equity is used as the discount rate, rather than the cost of capital (or weighed average cost of capital, WACC) which accounts for debt. In this calculation I’ve used 8.3%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.800. This is derived from the Bottom-Up Beta method based on comparable companies, with an imposed limit between 0.8 and 2.0, which is a reasonable range for a stable business.

Next Steps:

Whilst important, DCF calculation shouldn’t be the only metric you look at when researching a company. For BBY, I’ve put together three pertinent aspects you should further research:

Financial Health: Does BBY have a healthy balance sheet? Take a look at our free balance sheet analysis with six simple checks on key factors like leverage and risk.
Future Earnings: How does BBY’s growth rate compare to its peers and the wider market? Dig deeper into the analyst consensus number for the upcoming years by interacting with our free analyst growth expectation chart.
Other High Quality Alternatives: Are there other high quality stocks you could be holding instead of BBY? Explore our interactive list of high quality stocks to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!

PS. Simply Wall St does a DCF calculation for every GB stock every 6 hours, so if you want to find the intrinsic value of any other stock just search here.

To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.

The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.

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