An Intrinsic Value Calculation For Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (NYSE:BAH) Shows Investors Are Overpaying
Does the share price for Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (NYSE:BAH) reflect it’s really worth? Today, I will calculate the stock’s intrinsic value using the discounted cash flow (DCF) method. If you want to learn more about this method, the basis for my calculations can be found in detail in the Simply Wall St analysis model. If you are reading this after February 2018 then I highly recommend you check out the latest calculation for Booz Allen Hamilton Holding here.
What’s the value?
We are going to use a two-stage DCF model, which simply means we take in account two stages of company’s growth. In the initial period the company may have a higher growth rate and the second stage is usually assumed to have perpetual stable growth rate. To start off, I took the analyst consensus estimates of BAH’s levered free cash flow (FCF) over the next five years and discounted these figures at the cost of equity of 10.37%. When estimates weren’t available, I’ve extrapolated the average annual growth rate over the previous five years, capped at a reasonable level. This resulted in a present value of 5-year cash flow of $1,377.1M. Want to understand how I arrived at this number? Take a look at our detailed analysis here.
The infographic above illustrates how BAH’s top and bottom lines are expected to move in the future, which should give you an idea of BAH’s outlook. Now we need to calculate the terminal value, which is the business’s cash flow after the first stage. I think it’s suitable to use the 10-year government bond rate of 2.8% as the steady growth rate, which is rightly below GDP growth, but more towards the conservative side. After discounting the terminal value back five years, the present value becomes $2,956.1M.
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 $4,333.2M. To get the intrinsic value per share, we divide this by the total number of shares outstanding. This results in an intrinsic value of $29.72, which, compared to the current share price of $38.66, we see that Booz Allen Hamilton Holding is rather overvalued and not available at a discount at this time.
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. What is the reason for the share price to differ from the intrinsic value? For BAH, I’ve put together three fundamental factors you should look at:
1. Financial Health: Does BAH 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.
2. Future Earnings: How does BAH’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.
2. Other High Quality Alternatives: Are there other high quality stocks you could be holding instead of BAH? 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 pass 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.
