As an alternative, your Group decides to look at equity financing, which can be either the use of retained earnings from the right-hand side of the balance sheet (with the corresponding assets being short-term investments in current assets, or very large amounts in the cash account in current assets, or the disposal of other less efficient longer-term assets), or in the current case, the issuance of new common stock to finance the investment. But, in order to “get at” the cost of this new common stock equity, you have to review a few fundamentals with Mr. Moneypockets first.

a. your Group notes that HMK has just paid an annual dividend of $1.50. Analysts are predicting the dividend to grow by $0.12 per year over the next five years. After then, HMK’s earnings are expected to grow by 6% per year, and its dividend payout rate will remain constant. If HMK’s cost of capital (which is what we are eventually seeking for the overall weighted average cost of capital) is assumed to be 8.5% by your Group, what price will you tell Mr. Moneypockets that HMK stock should be selling for today, using the dividend-discount model as your technique?

b. alternatively, your Group expects free cash flows to be generated over the next five years as follows for HMK:

Year 1 2 3 4 5

FCF ($M) 53 68 78 75 82

After then, your Group expects the free cash flows to grow at the industry average of 6% per year (same rate as the growth in dividends after the first five years, per above). If you now switch to the discounted free cash flow model as an alternative, and use the same estimate of 8.5% as the equity cost of capital: --what will you tell Mr. Moneypockets that his “enterprise value” will be for HMK? --if HMK has no excess cash that can be used for this investment, but already has $300M of debt (none of which includes Option I debt financing above), and 40M shares outstanding of common stock, what will be your estimate of the stock price to Mr. Moneypockets?