Concerned that the increased debt burden might impede the company's current capital expansion program, argued for a less extreme approach. They favored an open - market purchase program instead. Under this option, the company would announce its intentions to repurchase its stock from " time to time" but only as corporate funds allowed. This course of action, therefore, did not call for any increase in debt.
On hearing the directors' concerns, a senior Vice President of MCI, William Duran, called Curtis to seek advice on the repurchase and particularly whether debt financing would be advisable. Duran also indicated that since the board hoped to disclose the details of its plan to improve shareholder value by the end of next week, it would be necessary to get back to him as soon as possible. Curtis responded quickly: She assigned a second - year associate, Lance Alton, to gauge the possible interest in any debt securities MCI might choose to issue, and she asked Mizuno to examine the consequences of substantially increasing the firm's use of debt. She instructed both of them to report their initial findings to her the following day.
Mizuno decided to compare MCI with its major competitors in long- distance telecommunications. However, he grew somewhat alarmed when his initial screen of peer companies produced approximately 40 firms in long-distance communication. He know that all of these firm could not be considered comparable to MCI based on their business risk, the markets they operated in, and their tax and regulatory environment. After comparing them to MCI on these dimensions. He narrowed his list to certain companies.
Exhibit 2 contains financial data for the peer companies. In assembling the data, Mizuno made several assumptions to help ensure consistency across the peer firms. First, although he was not certain of the tax status of each firm, he decided to initially assume that all companies faced a 40 percent tax rate. Second, it was the usual practice at Lynch to use a market- risk premium of 7.0 percent, the latest estimate of the arithmetic mean return of stocks over Treasury bonds.
Mizuno recalled from his finance classes that the maximum value of the firm corresponded to the lowest overall cost of capital. Thus, he intended to estimate what the cost of equity and the weighted -average cost of capital (WACC) might be if MCI pursued this capital-structure change. After discussions with other personnel at the bank, he concluded that the higher debt /equity ratio would increase MCI's borrowing costs from its current level of 6.10 percent. Exhibit 3 contains the latest capital market rates from which an estimate-mate of the revised borrowing costs could be obtained. But what would the cost of equity be? Mizuno decided that one approach was through "levering" and "unlevering" betas using the following equation
…....................……….……........
Where ...and.....are the betas for levered and unlevered equity, respectively: D and E are the market values of debt and equity, respectively: and T is the corporate tax rate.