Yahoo Finance Estimating The Intrinsic Value Of The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT)
Today I will be providing a simple run through of a valuation method used to estimate the attractiveness of The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) as an investment opportunity by taking the foreast future cash flows of the company and discounting them back to today’s value. I will use the Discounted Cash Flows (DCF) model. It may sound complicated, but actually it is quite simple! Anyone interested in learning a bit more about intrinsic value should have a read of the Simply Wall St analysis model. If you are reading this and its not October 2018 then I highly recommend you check out the latest calculation for New York Times by following the link below.
View our latest analysis for New York Times
Crunching the numbers
We are going to use a two-stage DCF model, which, as the name states, takes into account two stages of growth. The first stage is generally a higher growth period which levels off heading towards the terminal value, captured in the second ‘steady growth’ period. To start off with we need to estimate the next five years of cash flows. For this I used the consensus of the analysts covering the stock, as you can see below. I then discount this to its value today and sum up the total to get the present value of these cash flows.
5-year cash flow forecast
2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
Levered FCF ($, Millions) | $218.00 | $252.00 | $253.78 | $255.58 | $257.39 |
Source | Analyst x1 | Analyst x1 | Est @ 0.71% | Est @ 0.71% | Est @ 0.71% |
Present Value Discounted @ 9.54% | $199.01 | $210.01 | $193.07 | $177.50 | $163.18 |
Present Value of 5-year Cash Flow (PVCF)= US$943m
After calculating the present value of future cash flows in the intial 5-year period we need to calculate the Terminal Value, which accounts for all the future cash flows beyond the first stage. The Gordon Growth formula is used to calculate Terminal Value at an annual growth rate equal to the 10-year government bond rate of 2.9%. We discount this to today’s value at a cost of equity of 9.5%.
Terminal Value (TV) = FCF2022 × (1 + g) ÷ (r – g) = US$257m × (1 + 2.9%) ÷ (9.5% – 2.9%) = US$4.0b
Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV) = TV / (1 + r)5 = US$4.0b ÷ ( 1 + 9.5%)5 = US$2.5b
The total value is the sum of cash flows for the next five years and the discounted terminal value, which results in the Total Equity Value, which in this case is US$3.5b. The last step is to then divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. If the stock is an depositary receipt (represents a specified number of shares in a foreign corporation) then we use the equivalent number. This results in an intrinsic value of $21.17. Relative to the current share price of $24.3, the stock is fair value, maybe slightly overvalued and not available at a discount at this time.
The assumptions
The calculation above is very dependent on two assumptions. The first is the discount rate and the other is the cash flows. You don’t have to agree with my inputs, I recommend redoing the calculations yourself and playing with them. Because we are looking at New York Times as potential shareholders, the cost of equity is used as the discount rate, rather than the cost of capital (or weighed average cost of capital, WACC) which accounts for debt. In this calculation I’ve used 9.5%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.935. This is derived from the Bottom-Up Beta method based on comparable companies, with an imposed limit between 0.8 and 2.0, which is a reasonable range for a stable business.
Next Steps:
Valuation is only one side of the coin in terms of building your investment thesis, and it shouldn’t be the only metric you look at when researching a company. For NYT, there are three pertinent aspects you should further research:
Financial Health: Does NYT have a healthy balance sheet? Take a look at our free balance sheet analysis with six simple checks on key factors like leverage and risk.
Future Earnings: How does NYT’s growth rate compare to its peers and the wider market? Dig deeper into the analyst consensus number for the upcoming years by interacting with our free analyst growth expectation chart.
Other High Quality Alternatives: Are there other high quality stocks you could be holding instead of NYT? Explore our interactive list of high quality stocks to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!
PS. The Simply Wall St app conducts a discounted cash flow for every stock on the NYSE every 6 hours. If you want to find the calculation for other stocks just search here.
To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
