Chapter 17 Valuation and Capital Budgeting for the Levered Firm

Appendix 17A

17A-1

The Adjusted Present Value Approach to Valuing
Leveraged Buyouts1
Introduction

The RJR Nabisco Buyout In the summer of 1988, the price of RJR stock was hovering around $55 a share. The firm had $5 billion of debt. The firm’s CEO, acting in concert with some other senior managers of the firm, announced a bid of $75 per share to take the firm private in a management buyout. Within days of management’s offer, Kohlberg, Kravis, and
Roberts (KKR) entered the fray with a $90 bid of their own. By the end of November, KKR emerged from the ensuing bidding process with an offer of $109 a share, or $25 billion total. We now use the APV technique to analyze KKR’s winning strategy.
The APV method as described in this chapter can be used to value companies as well as projects. Applied in this way, the maximum value of a levered firm (VL) is its value as an all-equity entity (VU) plus the discounted value of the interest tax shields from the debt its assets will support (PVTS).2 This relation can be stated as:

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A leveraged buyout (LBO) is the acquisition by a small group of equity investors of a public or private company financed primarily with debt. The equityholders service the heavy interest and principal payments with cash from operations and/or asset sales. The shareholders generally hope to reverse the LBO within three to seven years by way of a public offering or sale of the company to another firm. A buyout is therefore likely to be successful only if the firm generates enough cash to serve the debt in the early years, and if the company is attractive to other buyers as the buyout matures.
In a leveraged buyout, the equity investors are expected to pay off outstanding principal according to a specific timetable. The owners know that the firm’s