Valuing Wal-Mart

There are large and small businesses all across the country, with many different public and private accounting firms that handle their accounts. Many of these businesses are raking in millions and millions of dollars a year. Wal-Mart is one of them. We will be exploring Wal-Mart and how it came about as a business, along with examining their balance sheets, income statement, and the cash flow statement. We will also be taking a look at what Wal-Mart’s current revenues are over the annual reporting periods, and who handles their accounting process.

We use Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) approach to calculate the cost of equity. The formula of CAPM is re = rf + β × (E[RMkt] – rf).

Thousands of people a day come into that store to buy groceries so we should take advantage. Wal-Mart is expanding on the number of stores where you can pick up groceries that you ordered online,and we all know that the internet is on the new. The turnaround in Wal-Mart is still in its early stages but that means that the stock is selling at a discount. Wal-Mart’s institutional ownership hit a ten year low in December to just 30.2%,while it was previously in the mid to upper 30%. That suggest that there could be potentially be enough demand for the stock to significantly push up the price. Recently,institutional investors have begun to start buying up the stock,taking ownership up to 30.6%. Investors say that Wal-Mart is more like a medium sized country than a mega-corporation. Wal-Mart announced October of last year that it would invest $2 billion in its e-commerce infrastructure over the next two years. Wal-Mart is doing so in order to compete better with the likes of Amazon.

Wal-Mart Corp has had very inconsistent asset-to-equity ratio form year to year which makes it difficult to draw any conclusion regarding investment. Such inconsistency could be an indication of

The purpose of this report is to evaluate the stock price of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (which ticker symbol in NYSE is WMT) by fundamental analysis. According to this analysis, I recommend that Wal-Mart is worth to invest in the long term because of the potential growth of market shares and revenue. Besides, based on P/E method and Gordon model, WMT price is undervalued; therefore, if investors buy the stock, they will get benefit not only in capital gain but also in dividend cash inflow.

The purpose of this paper is to advise analyze the financial statements of Dillard’s, Inc. in order to recommend whether or not my client should invest $1 million in the large retail company. I will compare the financial statements of Dillard’s, Inc. its competitor, Kohl’s Corporation. Investing in retail can be risky because a retail company’s performance is very heavily influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the actual company such as the overall performance of the economy or the weather during the holiday shopping season. There is, however, potential for profitability within the retail sector. Based on my analysis, I recommend that the client should not invest in Dillard’s, Inc. for the following reasons. First, Dillard’s has experience a decline in net income in the last three years. Second, liquidity ratios indicate that they could face possible liquidity constraints in the future. Third, long-term debt paying ability ratios indicate that the company could have trouble paying off the principal of its current debt obligations. Fourth, the profitability ratios are well below industry averages, suggesting that there are more profitable companies to invest in within the industry. And finally, Investor analysis ratios provide mixed opinion of the future performance of the company. I conclude that retail can be a profitable industry to invest in if an investor has the risk tolerance and risk capacity to withstand the uncertainty, but neither Dillard’s

Some applications of dividend discount modeling can be more complex. One method divides the future growth in dividends into three periods, all of which have different growth rates. This is useful when a company’s profits are expected to grow rapidly and then gradually decline to an industry average. The complexities of this model are outside of the scope of this report, and the model can easily be run using tools found online. The assumptions of this calculation as follows. Walmart is no longer in a growth phase, so this calculation assumes that it is at the transitional phase. Because of this, 2007 data is used to initialize the calculation (EPS, dividend, etc.,) and the ‘growth’ period was 3 years. Initial growth of EPS still assumed to be 10.4%. 14 transitional years, as required by the model (total of 17 years for growth and transition is required). All of these assumptions result in a 3 stage DDM

With the exception of ROE, most financial ratios and even absolute values bear testimony to Wal-Mart’s recognition as the leader in the retailing industry. The reason behind Sears’s higher ROE can be explained by a comparison of the 3 ratios that constitute the ratio known as DuPont identity that is profit margin, asset turnover and equity multiplier. While both firms had similar profit margins, Wal-Mart’s asset turnover was 2.8 compared to Sears’ 1.1 due to the firm’s effective utilization of assets and lease agreements to facilitate revenue generation.

In utilizing the fundamental data provided by the 2010 Richard Ivey School of Business Foundation article titled Valuing Wal-Mart - 2010, I have made the following conclusions regarding the value of Wal-Mart (WMT) stock as of February 2012.

The valuation process, in this case, requires us to estimate the short-run non-constant growth rate and predict future dividends. Then, we must estimate a constant long-term growth rate at which the firm is expected to grow. Generally, we assume that after a certain point of time, all firms begin to grow at a rather constant rate. Of course, the difficulty in this framework is estimating the short-term growth rate, how long the short-term growth will hold, and the long-term growth rate.

It is important for stockholders to continuously re-evaluate their investments. Although some investors do this more frequently and thoroughly than others, the majority of shareholders do so at least once each year. Therefore, Torres’ desire to update her analysis in order to determine whether Costco was still operating efficiently makes perfect sense. After thorough examination, my analysis proves that Costco remains one of the industry’s leading competitors and there seems to be no reason for Torres to sell her shares as long as she wishes to retain holdings of a retail wholesale club in her portfolio.

Most rely on valuation heuristics involving P/E, PEG, and price-to-sales . The simplicity of using heuristic triggers dependence on valuation heuristics as an alternative for the fundamental valuation. P/E, PEG, and price-to-sales need few variables and use simple formulas. Therefore , the estimates are rather perceptive THUS subject to bias. The cause of these biases arise from weak assumption made towards P/E, PEG, and price-to-sales inputs.

Theoretically, with the results of the P / E multiples, the company's value or performance can be determined by multiplying the company's profit with this ratio upon the target company. Phelps’s P/E multiples have increased from the previous quarter in which attract companies’ attention for acquisition. Higher P/E means PD use stock as consideration more frequently. In addition to positive EV/Sales, it shows that Phelps has more debt rather than cash. However, the growth of Phelps’ P/E targets a good prospect in future earnings. For ROE, as higher the return is better so, with this ROE, FCX can use it to compare the other companies.

To test the assumption of a discount rate of 7% as given in the outline of the case, we calculated the required rate of return for the Wal-Mart stock using CAPM . Using rWalMart = Rf + βWalMart [E(RM) – RF], we find the required rate of return to be 7.01% and in line with the information given in the case outline.

Wal-Mart is a company which operates in the service sector, more specifically in the “Discount, Variety Stores/Retail” industry. The company’s superior performance is demonstrated through the fact that it was America’s largest company (in terms of revenue) in 2002, and the reputation of the company is reflected in the opinion of “Fortune” who have identified Wal-Mart as one of the world’s most admired companies. In 2004 Wal-Mart had been hiring 1.4 million employees – making it the largest corporation in the world. Wal-Mart’s share prices have also been stable at time of stock market volatility. There are