Introduction to Distressed Debt Analysis: 4 Company Valuation Methods for Investors

Using Your Personal Experience and Expertise to Formulate an Investment Thesis

It’s time to take an in-depth look at distressed debt investing and how you can use your personal experience together with company valuation methods to make decisions.

Most investors will want to enter the distressed investing space by relying on the expertise of various funds that focus on these types of investments. Thus, I’ll address the constraints an individual investor faces and how one determined to make their picks can gain an advantage over others in the markets. You may not have the resources that top-level investors have access to, but with some elbow grease and patience, you can find attractive opportunities to exploit — mainly if you’re investing in companies you already understand from personal experience.

Then, we’ll explore the basics of valuation methodologies and why your personal experience can give you an advantage when making a valuation. This will help whether you are making your picks or not so that you can understand the various processes employed by the fund managers and analysts you are relying on, which some may now suspect to be no more sophisticated than the throwing of darts. 

The ultimate purpose of it all is to develop an investment thesis, which ideally is a written explanation for why you chose a particular investment so that you not only go through the process of formulating into words your reasoning behind making a choice but also have a record of those thoughts for reference.

Invest In What You Know

Typically, most of the companies that an individual investor considers fall outside of their direct experience and personal area of expertise, and that’s entirely reasonable — you can’t be an expert at everything! The expertise I’m referring to is the ability to carry on meaningful conversations about an industry with someone who’s spent their life in it, whether it’s the finer points of a new type of diagnostic test for knee injuries or the migration to a different type of drill bit for oil exploration. An expert in the field knows more than just the general concepts behind these developments — they know who has been successful at capitalizing on them and who hasn’t and why. The experts even have ‘war stories’ to relate to others.

When it comes to valuing a company, we would generally consider an expert to be someone who can name that company’s main competitors, list the issues that are going to affect the industry in the next few years, describe the impacts on the company in terms of changes to the business and customer base, and explain the different factors that move the company’s value. Even for an intelligent person looking at an industry daily, this level of expertise could take anywhere from 5 to 10 years to develop.

Most people are going to be hard-pressed to get that sort of understanding of a specific company. However, if you have been working in, or exposed to, a particular industry for a while, you have a front-row seat to the action and a direct pipeline to valuable knowledge. You would probably know better and sooner than Wall Street would know. Peter Lynch, the great Magellan Fund manager, said that people should “invest in what they know.” There will be one person who knows better, or at least sooner, than a knowledgeable analyst may, and that’s precisely the type of person on the ground. This is exactly the resource an analyst would seek out when making a thesis. Obtaining such an expert’s perspective is essential because there are different company valuation methods, and even if one performs all the valuation calculations correctly, different methods may yield different answers. So, knowing the industry and what drives a correct valuation is paramount in distressed debt analysis.

Types of Company Valuation Methods

There are five main valuation methods  that the savvy investor should be familiar with: precedent transactions, discounted cash flows, sum-of-parts, market comparisons, and market valuations. 

Precedent Transactions

The prime example of a precedent transaction is when one company is bought out by another. It can be one of the best ways of determining valuation because another party with a substantial financial interest has presumably already done a serious amount of due diligence to determine a price it is willing to pay. Of course, a purchasing company may be willing to pay a premium because of other benefits it receives, such as the ability to consolidate operations and cut its overall costs as well as those of the acquired company, access to a new customer base, and various proprietary information, and gaining control of what would otherwise be a hard-nosed competitor. 

Precedent transactions like a buy-out can also reduce the possibility of financing problems that you might otherwise have to consider carefully. For example, a smaller company you may have thought of investing in only had a few quarters worth of cash on hand, and if it ran into trouble it might have significant problems in obtaining new financing. If that company is bought out by a major parent corporation with lots of cash, such concerns disappear, and your confidence level rises. These benefits are often referred to by the buzzwords ‘synergies’ and ‘economies of scale.’

Discounted Cash Flows

A discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis looks at recent and projected revenues and then applies a discount to the current value based on how long one might have to wait for increased revenues. Medical research companies provide a great example of this, such as one that is in a testing phase for bringing a vaccine to market. You may see their product as worth $1 billion in revenue over 20 years if they pass all hurdles necessary to bring the vaccine to market like regulatory approvals.  So, you consider the risks to success and calculate value based on a discount in which future years’ projected revenues are offset by the time value of waiting for the revenue to come in, and then further discount based on the ‘likelihood of success’ factor. If the vaccine is successful, the billion dollars in revenue will not appear overnight — so you can’t value the company today at $1 billion. Each successive year of projected profits is less valuable today because of the lack of immediate access to that money, not to mention the potential for new challenges that may pop up, like lawsuits that can damage a product’s reputation or cause it to be pulled off the market.

Sum-of-Parts 

Next, consider a company that owns timber land. Let’s say they own 50,000 acres of land in a particular area with a specific type of wood. For this, you would want to use a sum-of-parts valuation, for which you would simply calculate the value of the various assets of the company, add them up, and then factor in the intangibles like goodwill.

Some hardwoods fetch upwards of $5,000 per acre. Interestingly, timber prices can be very stable — they were very stable before and after the financial crisis of 2008 — but since there are liquidity issues at times, with inventories unable to move, a timber company’s value would likely have to be discounted during such times. So, despite stable prices in a market, illiquidity of inventory can lead to significantly lowered prices of the assets of a company in that industry. Also, don’t forget to include cash on hand, interests in real property over and above that which relates to the core business, and other investments when doing a sum-of-parts valuation.

This type of company valuation method can be beneficial when analyzing companies with multiple divisions, as the sum of the value of each division, i.e., considering their value if they were each sold independently, could vary widely from how the market is currently valuing the company as a whole. Indeed, this is an excellent test to see how much of a premium, or discount, the market is setting on the intangible values of the company, given that, in theory, a company should at least be worth the sum of its parts.

Market Comparison

A market comparison essentially uses one or more of the above types of analyses, but rather than applying directly to the company to be valued, you apply them to similar companies in the field and then calculate a mark-up or mark-down of the company you’re trying to value based on how it differs in size, debt, and other obvious attributes. This type of analysis can be beneficial when you already have some thorough, reliable analyses or precedent transactions for similar companies in the same industry as the one you’re concerned with. For example, if you’re valuing Company A and a similar Company B was just sold for $80 million, then you could compare the debt load and other liability exposure, assets, revenue stream, etc., of Company A to Company B and get a good idea of what a similar buyer should be willing to pay for Company A.

Market Valuation

The last, generally least-reliable valuation method, although easiest and least interesting, to think about, is the market valuation.This is simply the number of shares of stock in the company multiplied by the stock’s price. 

However, market valuations are subject to several factors that may obscure a company’s actual value or lack thereof. Analyst reports, ratings, news items, insider activity, and a host of other issues can trigger knee-jerk reactions in which investors flock or flee from a given stock. Thus, while market valuation can tell you the level of a stock’s popularity at the moment and provide an initial step for investigating what is driving that popularity rating, it is not the purest of litmus tests upon which to place your confidence.

And let’s not forget the golden rule when it comes to stressed and distressed companies — always remember that in a bankruptcy, stock is essentially rendered worthless, with the company’s assets sold off to repay the various levels of creditors. Only afterward are stockholders compensated, if at all.

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[Editors’ Note: To learn more about this and related topics, you may want to attend the following on-demand webinars (which you can view at your leisure, and each includes a comprehensive customer PowerPoint about the topic):

1. Selecting the Right Valuation Expert
2. Valuing Your Brand and Other “Soft” Assets
3. What’s it Worth? Valuing a Business for Sale

This is an updated version of an article originally published on April 6, 2015 and updated April 24, 2020.]

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