Estimating The Fair Value Of FirstService Corporation (TSE:FSV)

Blake Harford

Tue, Jan 1, 2019, 7:14 AM

Does the January share price for FirstService Corporation (TSE:FSV) reflect it’s really worth? Today, I will calculate the stock’s intrinsic value by projecting its future cash flows and then discounting them to today’s value. I will use the Discounted Cash Flows (DCF) model. Don’t get put off by the jargon, the math behind it is actually quite straightforward. If you want to learn more about discounted cash flow, the basis for my calcs can be read in detail in the Simply Wall St analysis model. If you are reading this and its not January 2019 then I highly recommend you check out the latest calculation for FirstService by following the link below.

Check out our latest analysis for FirstService

Step by step through the calculation

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 begin with we have to get estimates of 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 estimate

	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Levered FCF ($, Millions)	$111.34	$125.76	$142.25	$160.90	$182.00
Source	Analyst x3	Analyst x3	Est @ 13.11%	Est @ 13.11%	Est @ 13.11%
Present Value Discounted @ 8.47%	$102.64	$106.89	$111.47	$116.24	$121.22

Present Value of 5-year Cash Flow (PVCF)= US$558m

The second stage is also known as Terminal Value, this is the business’s cash flow after the first stage. For a number of reasons a very conservative growth rate is used that cannot exceed that of the GDP. In this case I have used the 10-year government bond rate (2.3%). In the same way as with the 5-year ‘growth’ period, we discount this to today’s value at a cost of equity of 8.5%.

Terminal Value (TV) = FCF₂₀₂₃ × (1 + g) ÷ (r – g) = US$182m × (1 + 2.3%) ÷ (8.5% – 2.3%) = US$3.0b

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV) = TV / (1 + r)⁵ = US$3.0b ÷ ( 1 + 8.5%)⁵ = US$2.0b

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$2.6b. 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 CA$97.85. Relative to the current share price of CA$93.38, the stock is about right, perhaps slightly undervalued at a 4.6% discount to what it is available for right now.

TSX:FSV Intrinsic Value Export January 1st 19

Important assumptions

I’d like to point out that the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate and of course the actual cash flows. If you don’t agree with my result, have a go at the calculation yourself and play with the assumptions. Because we are looking at FirstService 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 8.5%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.800. 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 FSV, I’ve put together three important factors you should look at:

Financial Health: Does FSV 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 FSV’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 FSV? Explore our interactive list of high quality stocks to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!

PS. Simply Wall St does a DCF calculation for every CA stock every 6 hours, so if you want to find the intrinsic value of any other stock 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.

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