Yahoo Finance Investors Are Undervaluing News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA) By 27.75%
How far off is News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA) from its intrinsic value? Using the most recent financial data, I am going to take a look at whether the stock is fairly priced by taking the expected future cash flows and discounting them to their present 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 June 2018 then I highly recommend you check out the latest calculation for News by following the link below. Check out our latest analysis for News
The method
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 start off with we need to estimate the next five years of cash flows. Where possible I use analyst estimates, but when these aren’t available I have extrapolated the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the year before. For this growth rate I used the average annual growth rate over the past five years, but capped at a reasonable level. The sum of these cash flows is then discounted to today’s value.
5-year cash flow estimate
2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
Levered FCF ($, Millions) | $304.00 | $561.67 | $721.00 | $907.00 | $892.88 |
Source | Analyst x2 | Analyst x3 | Analyst x2 | Analyst x1 | Extrapolated @ (-1.56%) |
Present Value Discounted @ 8.94% | $279.06 | $473.29 | $557.71 | $644.03 | $581.99 |
Present Value of 5-year Cash Flow (PVCF)= US$2.54b
The second stage is also known as Terminal Value, this is the business’s cash flow after the first stage. The Gordon Growth formula is used to calculate Terminal Value at an annual growth rate equal to the 10-year government bond rate of 2.9%. We discount this to today’s value at a cost of equity of 8.9%.
Terminal Value (TV) = FCF2022 × (1 + g) ÷ (r – g) = US$892.88m × (1 + 2.9%) ÷ (8.9% – 2.9%) = US$15.35b
Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV) = TV / (1 + r)5 = US$15.35b ÷ ( 1 + 8.9%)5 = US$10.01b
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 US$12.54b. 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 $21.51. Relative to the current share price of $15.54, the stock is about right, perhaps slightly undervalued at a 27.75% discount to what it is available for right now.
Important 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. You don’t have to agree with my inputs, I recommend redoing the calculations yourself and playing with them. Because we are looking at News 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 8.9%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.849. 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:
Although the valuation of a company is important, it shouldn’t be the only metric you look at when researching a company. What is the reason for the share price to differ from the intrinsic value? For NWSA, there are three essential factors you should further research:
Financial Health: Does NWSA 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 NWSA’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 NWSA? 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 US stock every 6 hours, so if you want to find the intrinsic value of any other stock just search here.
To help readers see pass 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.
