Thier last two acquisitions, an anti-inflammatory drug, BruPain, and an anti-allergy medication, Immunol, were made using a discount rate assumption of 14%.Ron was highly skeptical because he felt that with their 20-year bonds selling to yield 12.69% at that time, 14% would be too low to cover the 6% risk premium that analysts had typically required on the firm's equity. We'll get by with debt financing on these 2 acquisitions, was John's way of justifying the decision, paying little heed to Ron's concerns. We have to get some more products in our portfolio, he remarked
After the announcement of NuChem’s last merger with Daychem , John Ziegler took early replaced by Paul Andrews, who had been serving as Daychem’s Vice-President of Finance. Unlike John, Paul preferred to be more objective and selective when evaluating new product acquisitions. He had heard about John’s arbitrary investment decision rule and had made it a point to tell Ron that he disagreed with it. “ I would rather that you estimate the firm’s Marginal Cost of capital using market value weights and flotation cost,” he had said to Ron during one of their earlier discussions. “I had worked really well for us as Daychem,” he said with pride.
“I totally agree,” Ron had replied, “I have been trying to convince John for years, but he would not buy it,” he said shrugging his shoulders.
At Paul’s request, Ron had set up a project team and had asked them to come up with some proposals for acquisitions. “Use a 10-year forecast, he recommended, ” and figure out what the residual value will be after 10 year.”
After careful analysis, the project team had come up with 4 recommendations: an ophthalmology product, an anti-viral drug, an anti-cancer medication , and an antibiotic. The detailed projections and other relevant information are shown in Tables 1-7 below. All 4 products had fairly good projections and looked profitable over the 10 year horizon, but having been burned the last two time, Ron couldn’t help wondering, “Where do we draw the line?”