Basics of Valuation

All companies deal with valuation from time to time. Capital budgeting, company and asset valuation, or value based management rely on valuation.

Two approaches are the foundation of valuation, discounted cash flow valuation and relative valuation. The first one is a bottom-up approach where the present value of an asset’s future cash flows is calculated, the second determines the value of an asset by comparing it to similar other assets.

While relative valuation is well applicable by common sense, DCF needs considerable understanding of the relevant input parameters. As DCF is a vital approach to valuation in life sciences and the basis of decision tree analysis and real options valuation, it is worthwhile to discuss in detail how the method is properly applied.

We discuss in the following chapters the reasoning behind DCF and how to define the input parameters to value an asset. We also discuss the current problems to this valuation approach, such as the problem of risk and uncertainty, and some methods that try to overcome these problems.