Financial Leverage Ratios
The use of debt in the financing of businesses is called leverage. In physics, leverage is something that enhances the performance of a given force. Debt, as a financing tool, has a similar effect on firm performance (and risk).
Imagine you would like to establish a hotdog kiosk in New York City. Imagine also, for simplicity, that the tax authority thinks this would be a great idea, and wishes to help you by declaring your business to be tax free. You have $10,000 available to use as the initial investment and the Profitability of your business is 20%. Table 4.1 summarizes the initial situation of the company.
Suppose that, after observing the success of your new endeavor, you decide to double its size. By looking at your account balances, however, you realize you do not have sufficient financial resources of your own to use. Therefore, you decide to ask for a $10,000 loan, for which the bank charges a 10% interest rate. If we assume that the business has constant returns to scale (i.e., if you double the investment, the results would double, or in other words, ROA remains at 20%), you will face a scenario like the one pictured in Figure 4.1.
Based on these results (ROE is now 50% higher!), you think you should push the idea further, and keep leveraging your business. To do so, You go back to bank and ask for another $10,000 loan. The bank agrees to do so, but this time it decides to charge a 12% interest rate on all its debt, given the increased financial risk your endeavor is now subject to. At this point, the financial situation of the company will be as listed in Figure 4.2.
Because your ROE continues to increase, you may be tempted to conclude that debt must be a good thing, since every time you use more of it, your return as a shareholder (ROE) increases, that is, that debt increases the power of your own investment! However, as economists like to say, there are no free lunches; the increased ROE comes at the cost of increasing the sensitivity of ROE to fluctuations in the firm’s operating returns; that is, given that shareholders are residual claimants (their claim is on whatever the business generates after all other claims-employees’, suppliers’, debt holders’, etc.-have been paid), a higher level of debt increases shareholders’ risk (i.e., a larger portion of the generated cash flow is committed to other parties).
An increase in a firm’s financial leverage will increase its ROE every time its ROA is higher than the cost of debt. The intuition for this is as follows. If an extra dollar invested in the firm generates an operating profit (ROA) higher than its corresponding cost (given by the interest rate on the borrowed funds, K ), the surplus will go to the shareholder, and therefore ROE increases. However, the corresponding ROE is obtained by shareholders, who now face not only the firm’s operating risk (fluctuations in cash flow generation capacity) but also financial risk. As a consequence, investors have to be careful when deciding how much debt to use or, in other words, when deciding whether debt effectively creates value to shareholders.
Typical ratios used to help evaluate the firm’s financial conditions are:
The first of these ratios shows how much a firm relies on debt to finance its assets’ structure. The second and third ratios indicate how many dollars of debt (financial debt) are used for every dollar of equity financing. The last ratio gives the number of times a firm can pay its interest expenses with its EBIT; this ratio is broadly used by banks or bond holders, since it indicates the confidence one could have that the firm will be able to pay its interest expenses. Analysis of these ratios has to be done in light of the company’s overall strategy to be able to give one a sense of a financial policy’s adequacy.