Hey! I had a mock group case study exercise the other day and I came across something quite unusual in the material presented. The task was to advise the client on which company of three to acquire, and for one of the companies it was noted that accurate figures for forecasted cash flow were not available and so the figure was derived by comparing the company with a similar company in a different sector. I have three questions:
1) Am I right in understanding this as a market approach valuation?
2) Beyond noting that this is obviously less accurate (and a bit of a red flag) than other valuations which were based on figures publicly available for the respective companies, I wasn't sure what other information I could ask for- is there something that I could recommend or documents I could ask for to gain a better valuation or is the lack of publicly available figures the end of the story?
3) Why would accurate figures for forecasted cash flow not be available in the first place?
Finally, for the other two companies it was noted that we are confident in the accuracy of this valuation because "figures publicly available" were used. As above, do we just take this for granted and move ahead or is there more to unpack?
I'd really appreciate any advice since I'm just starting to gain a better insight into company valuations