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Concept
Weighted average cost of capital
Summary
The weighted average cost of capital (WACC) is the rate that a company is expected to pay on average to all its security holders to finance its assets. The WACC is commonly referred to as the firm's cost of capital. Importantly, it is dictated by the external market and not by management. The WACC represents the minimum return that a company must earn on an existing asset base to satisfy its creditors, owners, and other providers of capital, or they will invest elsewhere.
Companies raise money from a number of sources: common stock, preferred stock and related rights, straight debt, convertible debt, exchangeable debt, employee stock options, pension liabilities, executive stock options, governmental subsidies, and so on. Different securities, which represent different sources of finance, are expected to generate different returns. The WACC is calculated taking into account the relative weights of each component of the capital structure. The more complex the company's capital structure, the more laborious it is to calculate the WACC.
Companies can use WACC to see if the investment projects available to them are worthwhile to undertake.
In general, the WACC can be calculated with the following formula:
where is the number of sources of capital (securities, types of liabilities); is the required rate of return for security ; and is the market value of all outstanding securities .
In the case where the company is financed with only equity and debt, the average cost of capital is computed as follows:
where is the total debt, is the total shareholder's equity, is the cost of debt, and is the cost of equity. The market values of debt and equity should be used when computing the weights in the WACC formula.
Tax effects can be incorporated into this formula. For example, the WACC for a company financed by one type of shares with the total market value of and cost of equity and one type of bonds with the total market value of and cost of debt , in a country with corporate tax rate , is calculated as:
This calculation can vary significantly due to the existence of many plausible proxies for each element.
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