How Do We Calculate a Companys Weighted Average Cost of Capital?
We calculate a company’s weighted average cost of capital using a 3 step process: 1. Cost of capital components. First, we calculate or infer the cost of each kind of capital that the enterprise uses, namely debt and equity. A. Debt capital. The cost of debt capital is equivalent to actual or imputed interest rate on the company’s debt, adjusted for the tax-deductibility of interest expenses. Specifically: The after-tax cost of debt-capital = The Yield-to-Maturity on long-term debt x (1 minus the marginal tax rate in %) We enter the marginal tax rate in cell C10 of worksheet “Inputs.” B. Equity capital. Equity shareholders, unlike debt holders, do not demand an explicit return on their capital. However, equity shareholders do face an implicit opportunity cost for investing in a specific company, because they could invest in an alternative company with a similar risk profile. Thus, we infer the opportunity cost of equity capital. We can do this by using the “Capital Asset Pricing Model”
