Topic: Valuation – an Art or a Science
Speaker: Rebecca Pang, CFA, CIBC
CCFA has successfully held another lunch-and-learn event on Thursday, November 27th, 2015. We were honored to have Rebecca Pang, Senior Director of CIBC Channel Strategy and Analytics. Rebecca shared her insights on business valuation and valuation process in Mergers and Acquisitions, Investment Banking and Strategy & Corporate Development areas. Around 40 financial practitioners and professionals participated in this event. The talk was well received and ended with an animated Q&A session showing very good feedback from the audience.
After a warm opening remark about Rebecca’s background by Dr. Laurent Wu, the moderator of the lunch and learn event, Rebecca began sharing her thoughts on the importance and applications of business valuation, the arts and science sides of the valuation, and the career option at the end.
Recent days, valuation matters more than ever – valuing a company before make a stock investment, valuing a franchise business for purchase, watching the recent booming of M&A with valuations getting back into the dangerous zone, etc. At first, Rebecca highlighted the importance of valuation in areas of Risk management, PE/ Investing, Tax, Mergers & Acquisition, Business Case, Strategic Planning, Litigation, Investment Decision and Fairness Option.
Then she introduced the Science aspect of valuation such as the Definition of Fair Market Value, Key Valuation Methodologies - Market approach, Income Approach, Cost Approach and Leveraged Buyout including various approaches of Comparable, Precedent, DCF, Discount rate/WACC, Terminal Value. On the other hand, valuation is also considered as an Art. Rebecca explained various valuation approaches – the tools depending on industry differences, Discounts and premiums, Historical F/S adjustments, Inclusion of synergies and Intangibles.
In the last section of the speech, Rebecca provided an introduction of business valuation certification information. Rebecca finished her speech with an overview of different career paths of valuation professionals which actually helps the audiences to have an even clearer idea about future development as a business valuation professional.
From CCFA Communication
