Introduction:
Economic value-added (EVA) has increasingly gain acceptance amongst many top-notched organization. This performance metric for creating shareholders wealth is closely tied with the Value Based Management as they share the same principle of realigning business practices towards increasing shareholder value.
Formula:
In simple term, EVA is:
after-tax operating profit remaining after deducting a charge for the capital employed in the business:
EVA=Net operating profit after tax(NOPAT)-(Capital employed x Cost of capital)
[ NOPAT is a measure of the operating profit of an organization whilst capital employed is a measure of its business investment and cost of capital is the financing cost similar but not identical to borrowing costs.]
As this represents real profit, positive EVA enhances shareholder value whilst negative EVA reduces shareholder value.
Advantages Of EVA Versus Other Performance Metrics:
Many are still using earnings per share and return on assets to reflect increase or decrease in shareholder value. However, there are limitations in using such ratios:
- Earnings per share tell us nothing about the cost of generating those profits. If the cost of capital (loans, bonds, equity) is, say, 17 percent, then a 16 percent earning is actually a reduction, not a gain, in economic value. These profits also increase taxes, thereby reducing cash flow, which drain economic value of the company.
- Return on assets is a more realistic measure of economic performance as it attempts to relate how much profit a business generates relative to its asset levels, but again this metric ignores the cost of capital. A company might have a high profitable year with high return on assets but it might not be a surprise if its cost of capital can be higher than its ROA %.
Advantages/Benefits of Using EVA:
As for EVA we can see some of the following distinctive advantages:
- In my earlier article, we have compared EVA with earnings per share and return on investment/assets and found that both the traditional ratios do not reflect the true cost of capital- there is no hinge whether shareholders value have been created or destroyed,
- EVA is extremely easy to compute- just extract the data from both the income statement and the balance sheet and put in some adjustments to derive the EVA,
- EVA is easy to understand like the net present value (NPV) concept wherein EVA( particularly future EVA) if positive, increases shareholders’ wealth and a negative EVA is vice versa,
- EVA is easy for layman besides accountants to understand its concept as it is logical and comply with the economic terms of “economic profit” ,
- EVA is part of Return on Investment re deploys assets turnovers and utilization which ordinary managers can easily relate to,
- EVA is also really the discounted free cash flows of a business,
- EVA is an all round performance metric which measures the operating profit, business investment and the cost of capital as a financing cost .
- As EVA is a performance metric principally for gauging the creation or not of the shareholder value, it therefore should complements very greatly the Value-based management (VBM) methodology.
Limitations/Pitfall/Cons Of EVA:
However, like any other financial performance metric, EVA still suffers the following pitfall(s) or cons:-
As EVA is still based on an accounting based concept, it therefore suffers:
- like other accounting rate of returns for example like the ROI. Using the normal accounting convention of the historical costs concept, asset values are quoted on historical costs unaffected by inflation, the true rate of return is not able to be properly ascertained,
- EVA is distorted by the fact of the upfront normal depreciation being small at the beginning of a project and big at the end of the project. Therefore companies with a lot of new investments have lower EVA than their true profitability would imply and companies with a lot of old investments have bigger EVA than their true profitability would imply. The extent of this challenge depends on the asset structure (the relative proportions of current assets, depreciable assets, un-depreciable assets) and on the length of the investment period. This pattern is similar to the ROI where when we examine a single project the ROI is a poor estimator or the true rate of return, since at the beginning of the project when the capital base is big, the ROI is small and then at the end when the capital base is small then the ROI is big.
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