The US firm Google operates in the online advertising business. In 2011 Google bought Motorola Mobility which manufactures mobile phones.
Assume the following:
- Google had a 10% after-tax weighted average cost of capital (WACC) before it bought Motorola.
- Motorola had a 20% after-tax WACC before it merged with Google.
- Google and Motorola have the same level of gearing.
- Both companies operate in a classical tax system.
You are a manager at Motorola. You must value a project for making mobile phones. Which method(s) will give the correct valuation of the mobile phone manufacturing project? Select the most correct answer.
The mobile phone manufacturing project's:
A newly floated farming company is financed with senior bonds, junior bonds, cumulative non-voting preferred stock and common stock. The new company has no retained profits and due to floods it was unable to record any revenues this year, leading to a loss. The firm is not bankrupt yet since it still has substantial contributed equity (same as paid-up capital).
On which securities must it pay interest or dividend payments in this terrible financial year?
The accounting identity states that the book value of a company's assets (A) equals its liabilities (L) plus owners equity (OE), so A = L + OE.
The finance version states that the market value of a company's assets (V) equals the market value of its debt (D) plus equity (E), so V = D + E.
Therefore a business's assets can be seen as a portfolio of the debt and equity that fund the assets.
Let ##\sigma_\text{V total}^2## be the total variance of returns on assets, ##\sigma_\text{V syst}^2## be the systematic variance of returns on assets, and ##\sigma_\text{V idio}^2## be the idiosyncratic variance of returns on assets, and ##\rho_\text{D idio, E idio}## be the correlation between the idiosyncratic returns on debt and equity.
Which of the following equations is NOT correct?
Private equity firms are known to buy medium sized private companies operating in the same industry, merge them together into a larger company, and then sell it off in a public float (initial public offering, IPO).
If medium-sized private companies trade at PE ratios of 5 and larger listed companies trade at PE ratios of 15, what return can be achieved from this strategy?
Assume that:
- The medium-sized companies can be bought, merged and sold in an IPO instantaneously.
- There are no costs of finding, valuing, merging and restructuring the medium sized companies. Also, there is no competition to buy the medium-sized companies from other private equity firms.
- The large merged firm's earnings are the sum of the medium firms' earnings.
- The only reason for the difference in medium and large firm's PE ratios is due to the illiquidity of the medium firms' shares.
- Return is defined as: ##r_{0→1} = (p_1-p_0+c_1)/p_0## , where time zero is just before the merger and time one is just after.
An investor owns an empty block of land that has local government approval to be developed into a petrol station, car wash or car park. The council will only allow a single development so the projects are mutually exclusive.
All of the development projects have the same risk and the required return of each is 10% pa. Each project has an immediate cost and once construction is finished in one year the land and development will be sold. The table below shows the estimated costs payable now, expected sale prices in one year and the internal rates of returns (IRR's).
| Mutually Exclusive Projects | |||
| Project | Cost now ($) |
Sale price in one year ($) |
IRR (% pa) |
| Petrol station | 9,000,000 | 11,000,000 | 22.22 |
| Car wash | 800,000 | 1,100,000 | 37.50 |
| Car park | 70,000 | 110,000 | 57.14 |
Which project should the investor accept?
The average weekly earnings of an Australian adult worker before tax was $1,542.40 per week in November 2014 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Therefore average annual earnings before tax were $80,204.80 assuming 52 weeks per year. Personal income tax rates published by the Australian Tax Office are reproduced for the 2014-2015 financial year in the table below:
| Taxable income | Tax on this income |
|---|---|
| 0 – $18,200 | Nil |
| $18,201 – $37,000 | 19c for each $1 over $18,200 |
| $37,001 – $80,000 | $3,572 plus 32.5c for each $1 over $37,000 |
| $80,001 – $180,000 | $17,547 plus 37c for each $1 over $80,000 |
| $180,001 and over | $54,547 plus 45c for each $1 over $180,000 |
The above rates do not include the Medicare levy of 2%. Exclude the Medicare levy from your calculations
How much personal income tax would you have to pay per year if you earned $80,204.80 per annum before-tax?
Which one of the below option and futures contracts gives the possibility of potentially unlimited gains?
A 4.5% fixed coupon Australian Government bond was issued at par in mid-April 2009. Coupons are paid semi-annually in arrears in mid-April and mid-October each year. The face value is $1,000. The bond will mature in mid-April 2020, so the bond had an original tenor of 11 years.
Today is mid-September 2015 and similar bonds now yield 1.9% pa.
What is the bond's new price? Note: there are 10 semi-annual coupon payments remaining from now (mid-September 2015) until maturity (mid-April 2020); both yields are given as APR's compounding semi-annually; assume that the yield curve was flat before the change in yields, and remained flat afterwards as well.
An Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock was purchased by an investor for $120 and one year later was sold for $150. A dividend of $4 was also collected at the end of the year just before the stock was sold.
Which of the following statements about the stock investment is NOT correct? Ignore taxes.
Over the year, the investor made a:
.