What’s in a Multiple?

What’s a company worth? Seasoned investors know that finding the answer to that question is more art than science. One way to do so is from the bottom up, to calculate a firm’s intrinsic value using a discounted cash flow methodology. The other is to come at the question from the top down, by using a relative valuation approach via market multiples. While there are many types of multiples, each reflects the market’s evaluation of a company’s expected operational performance, and can be used to cut across times, sectors, and markets.

Investor expectations about future revenue growth and profitability both play a key role in driving multiples. Investors obviously prefer high levels of both. But if there’s only one to be had, which combination do investors value more highly? Superior growth and low profitability? Or lower growth and high profitability? Credit Suisse recently analyzed the performance and multiples of companies with market capitalizations of more than $1 billion (excluding financial firms and utilities) between 2004 and 2015, to find out.

Not surprisingly, the bank found that companies with above-median projected growth in revenue and above-median projected profitability traded at an 11.5x EV/EBITDA multiple, compared to just 7.5x for firms with below-median estimates for future revenue growth and profitability. (For reference, the median projected revenue growth was 5.4 percent and the median profitability was 6.5 percent cash flow return on investment.)

But back to the question of revenue growth versus profitability. It turns out that firms with below-median forecasted growth but above-median projected profitability earned higher EV/EBITDA multiples (10.2x) than faster-growing but less profitable companies (8.7x). Furthermore, increases in expected profitability had more of an effect on valuations than did an increase in expected sales. Regardless of whether a company is expected to grow above or below the market median, if it manages to improve profitability above median levels, the effect is dramatic—an additional 2.7 times enterprise value relative to the company’s forward cash flows. That was more than twice the effect that improving revenue growth—an additional 1.2 times EV/EBITDA—awarded to those companies that managed to climb into above-median revenue growth territory. Those that were able to vault over the median in both categories saw multiples rise by 4x EV/EBITDA. In short growth matters more when you combined it with superior return on capital.

Source: Credit Suisse HOLT Corporate Advisory

It’s interesting to note that the current preference for profitability over growth is a relatively recent phenomenon. Between 2004 and 2007, companies with above-average revenue growth expectations traded at higher valuations than those with high profit expectations. During the financial crisis, there was no clear pattern to investor preferences, but high-profitability companies began to deliver higher premiums in 2012.

One possible rationale for the shift: Over the past decade, it’s been easier to keep returns on capital up than to produce drastic increases in sales. Fewer than one-third (29 percent) of companies that produced above-average revenue growth between 2004 and 2009 did the same between 2010 and 2015, while nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of companies that were highly profitable in the first five-year period remained so in the second.

Investors, in other words, can be fickle. So how should that affect executive decision-making? For executives making resource allocation decisions, it’s clear that both profitability and growth matter. But understanding exactly what drives investor sentiment about a company is important not only in choosing between competing strategies — those promising faster growth or superior profitability (or, in an ideal world, both) — but also what to buy and how to buy it. Knowing how expectations of future growth and profitability drive valuations can help companies decide on the right price to pay for potential targets as well as secondary decisions, such as whether equity or cash purchases make more sense. In other words, multiples matter for more than just bragging rights.