A Look At The Intrinsic Value Of Carnival Corporation (NYSE:CCL)
Does the share price for Carnival Corporation (NYSE:CCL) reflect it’s really worth? Today, I will calculate the stock’s intrinsic value using the discounted cash flow (DCF) method. Anyone interested in learning a bit more about intrinsic value should have a read of the Simply Wall St analysis model. Also note that this article was written in May 2018 so be sure check the latest calculation for Carnival here.
Crunching the numbers
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 use the analyst consensus forecast of CCL’s levered free cash flow (FCF) over the next five years and discounted these figures at the cost of equity of 10.75%. 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 US$11.99B. Keen to know how I arrived at this number? Take a look at our detailed analysis here.
Above is a visual representation of how CCL’s top and bottom lines are expected to move going forward, which should give you an idea of CCL’s outlook. Then, I determine the terminal value, which accounts for all the future cash flows after the five years. I think it’s suitable to use the 10-year government bond rate of 2.8% as the perpetual growth rate, which is rightly below GDP growth, but more towards the conservative side. The present value of the terminal value after discounting it back five years is US$37.22B.
The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the cash flows, which in this case is US$49.20B. To get the intrinsic value per share, we divide this by the total number of shares outstanding. This results in an intrinsic value of $68.89, which, compared to the current share price of $63.15, we see that Carnival is about right, perhaps slightly undervalued at a 8.33% discount to what it is available for right now.
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 CCL, I’ve compiled three key aspects you should further examine:
Financial Health: Does CCL 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 CCL’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 CCL? 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 US stock every 6 hours, so if you want to find the intrinsic value of any other stock 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.
