Return on investment for profits after investment

Question

Hello everybody,

I have recently worked on the Desert City case in the Yale Casebook. The case involved a project with an initial investment of $110m and a yearly and constant profit of $22m. Is there a metric that allows me to say that we get a profit of 20% of our investment back each year similar to a return on investment but without having a discount rate?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Dear Alexander,

I just went through the case as to be able to provide an answer.
From what I understand, you are looking for a metric to express the profit (22M) vs investment (110M) without having to use NPV.

For this particular case, I would say you could rely on basic "common sense", which is a key skill as consultant. Often you won't have the time to go for the nitty gritty analysis and will have to use some "common sense".

The client expects a payback period of 3 years. Let's just ignore the discounting for this:

Given the profit of 22M, the payback period without discounting would be 110M/22M = 5 years
Given discounting will make the future profits lower today (dividing by (1+WACC)^years), the real payback period will be even longer
Therefore, the client should not progress with this project

I truly hope this is of any help to you!

Kind regards,
Sibren

Answer 2

Not sure I understand your question, beause the way I interpret it is trivial: we generate a Yearly RoI of 20%. The Total RoI is [Yearly RoI] x [Number of Years].

Cheers, Sidi