Your task is to determine the WACC for a given firm using what you know about WACC, as well as data you
can find through research. Your deliverable is a brief report in which you state your determination of
WACC, describe and justify how you determined the number, and provide relevant information as to the
sources of your data.
Select a publicly-traded company that has debt or bonds and common stock to calculate the current
WACC. One good source for financial data for companies, as well as data about their equity, is Yahoo!
Finance. By looking around this site, you should be able to find the market capitalization (E) as well as the
β for any
publicly-traded company.
There are not many places left where data about corporate bonds are still available. One of them is the
Finra Bonds website. To find data for a particular company’s publicly traded bonds use the Quick Search
feature, then be sure to specify corporate bonds and type in the name of the issuing company. This should
give you a list of all of the company’s outstanding bond issues. Clicking on the symbol for a given bond
issue will lead you to the current amount outstanding and the yield to maturity. You are interested in both.
The total of all bonds outstanding is D in the above formula.
If you like, you can use the YTM on a bond issue that is not callable as the pre-tax cost of debt for the
company.
Assumptions:
As you recall, the formula for WACC is:
rWACC = (E/E+D) rE + D/(E+D) rD (1-TC)
The formula for the required return on a given equity investment is:
ri= rf + βi * (RMkt-rf)
Mkt-rf is the Market Risk Premium. For this project, you may assume the Market Risk Premium is 5%
unless you can develop a better number.
rf is the risk-free rate. The risk-free rate is normally the yield on US Treasury securities such as a 10-year
treasury. For this assignment, please use 3.5%.
You may assume a corporate tax rate of 40%.
Submit the following:
Write a 350- to 700-word report that contains the following elements:
How data was used to calculate WACC (provide the formula and the formula with your values substituted)
Sources for your data
A discussion of how much confidence you have in your answer, including what the limiting assumptions
you made were, if any Include a Microsoft® Excel® file showing your WACC calculations discussed above.
Sample Solution