Discover essential financial strategies tailored for your immediate family. Secure their future with budgeting tips, investment advice, and effective planning to ensure lasting financial stability.
Discover essential financial strategies tailored for your immediate family. Secure their future with budgeting tips, investment advice, and effective planning to ensure lasting financial stability.
Does the December share price for Apex Healthcare Berhad (KLSE:AHEALTH) reflect what it’s really worth? Today, we will estimate the stock’s intrinsic value by projecting its future cash flows and then discounting them to today’s value. We will use the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model on this occasion. Believe it or not, it’s not too difficult to follow, as you’ll see from our example!
Companies can be valued in a lot of ways, so we would point out that a DCF is not perfect for every situation. If you want to learn more about discounted cash flow, the rationale behind this calculation can be read in detail in the Simply Wall St analysis model.
We’re using the 2-stage growth model, which simply means we take in account two stages of company’s growth. In the initial period the company may have a higher growth rate and the second stage is usually assumed to have a stable growth rate. In the first stage we need to estimate the cash flows to the business over the next ten years. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren’t available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.
Generally we assume that a dollar today is more valuable than a dollar in the future, and so the sum of these future cash flows is then discounted to today’s value:
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029
2030
2031
2032
2033
2034
Levered FCF (MYR, Millions)
RM74.7m
RM79.1m
RM82.9m
RM86.5m
RM90.1m
RM93.7m
RM97.3m
RM101.0m
RM104.8m
RM108.6m
Growth Rate Estimate Source
Analyst x1
Analyst x1
Est @ 4.76%
Est @ 4.41%
Est @ 4.16%
Est @ 3.99%
Est @ 3.86%
Est @ 3.78%
Est @ 3.72%
Est @ 3.68%
Present Value (MYR, Millions) Discounted @ 8.0%
RM69.1
RM67.8
RM65.7
RM63.5
RM61.2
RM58.9
RM56.6
RM54.4
RM52.2
RM50.1
(“Est” = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St) Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = RM600m
The second stage is also known as Terminal Value, this is the business’s cash flow after the first stage. For a number of reasons a very conservative growth rate is used that cannot exceed that of a country’s GDP growth. In this case we have used the 5-year average of the 10-year government bond yield (3.6%) to estimate future growth. In the same way as with the 10-year ‘growth’ period, we discount future cash flows to today’s value, using a cost of equity of 8.0%.
Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= RM2.5b÷ ( 1 + 8.0%)10= RM1.2b
The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the future cash flows, which in this case is RM1.8b. To get the intrinsic value per share, we divide this by the total number of shares outstanding. Compared to the current share price of RM2.5, the company appears around fair value at the time of writing. Remember though, that this is just an approximate valuation, and like any complex formula – garbage in, garbage out.
KLSE:AHEALTH Discounted Cash Flow December 19th 2024
We would 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 these inputs, I recommend redoing the calculations yourself and playing with them. The DCF also does not consider the possible cyclicality of an industry, or a company’s future capital requirements, so it does not give a full picture of a company’s potential performance. Given that we are looking at Apex Healthcare Berhad as potential shareholders, the cost of equity is used as the discount rate, rather than the cost of capital (or weighted average cost of capital, WACC) which accounts for debt. In this calculation we’ve used 8.0%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.800. Beta is a measure of a stock’s volatility, compared to the market as a whole. We get our beta from the industry average beta of globally comparable companies, with an imposed limit between 0.8 and 2.0, which is a reasonable range for a stable business.
Strength
Weakness
Opportunity
Threat
Valuation is only one side of the coin in terms of building your investment thesis, and it is only one of many factors that you need to assess for a company. The DCF model is not a perfect stock valuation tool. Instead the best use for a DCF model is to test certain assumptions and theories to see if they would lead to the company being undervalued or overvalued. If a company grows at a different rate, or if its cost of equity or risk free rate changes sharply, the output can look very different. For Apex Healthcare Berhad, we’ve compiled three pertinent items you should further examine:
Future Earnings: How does AHEALTH’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: Do you like a good all-rounder? Explore our interactive list of high quality stocks to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!
PS. The Simply Wall St app conducts a discounted cash flow valuation for every stock on the KLSE every day. If you want to find the calculation for other stocks just search here.
Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content?Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.
This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
