Estimating The Intrinsic Value Of Career Education Corporation (NASDAQ:CECO)

Petra Goodwin

Tue, Jan 1, 2019, 9:09 AM

Does the January share price for Career Education Corporation (NASDAQ:CECO) reflect it’s really worth? Today, I will calculate the stock’s intrinsic value by taking the foreast future cash flows of the company and discounting them back to today’s value. I will be using 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. Please also note that this article was written in January 2019 so be sure check out the updated calculation by following the link below.

View our latest analysis for Career Education

Crunching the numbers

I use what is known as a 2-stage model, which simply means we have two different periods of varying growth rates for the company’s cash flows. Generally the first stage is higher growth, and the second stage is a more stable growth phase. 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. The sum of these cash flows is then discounted to today’s value.

5-year cash flow forecast

	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Levered FCF ($, Millions)	$82.80	$86.30	$77.56	$69.70	$62.64
Source	Analyst x1	Analyst x1	Est @ -10.13%	Est @ -10.13%	Est @ -10.13%
Present Value Discounted @ 9.87%	$75.36	$71.49	$58.48	$47.83	$39.13

Present Value of 5-year Cash Flow (PVCF)= US$292m

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. 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 (2.9%). In the same way as with the 5-year ‘growth’ period, we discount this to today’s value at a cost of equity of 9.9%.

Terminal Value (TV) = FCF₂₀₂₃ × (1 + g) ÷ (r – g) = US$63m × (1 + 2.9%) ÷ (9.9% – 2.9%) = US$932m

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV) = TV / (1 + r)⁵ = US$932m ÷ ( 1 + 9.9%)⁵ = US$582m

The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the cash flows, which in this case is US$874m. In the final step we 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) or ADR then we use the equivalent number. This results in an intrinsic value of $12.53. Compared to the current share price of $11.49, the stock is about right, perhaps slightly undervalued at a 8.3% discount to what it is available for right now.

NasdaqGS:CECO 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. You don’t have to agree with my inputs, I recommend redoing the calculations yourself and playing with them. Because we are looking at Career Education 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 9.9%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.982. 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 CECO, there are three fundamental aspects you should further examine:

Financial Health: Does CECO 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 CECO’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 CECO? 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 NASDAQ 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.

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