Welcome everyone to the sixth, the final week our corporate finance course. I congratulate everyone who has lived up to this point. So there is not much to be covered. So this week will be shorter, and it will not contain many formulas, and it will be devoted to the wrap-up, to the conclusions, to the steps that people have to take in project evaluation. And, also, I will provide some positive messages that I promised some time ago of how you can profit from knowing corporate finance. Well, in our first episode, we will come back to the criteria of valuation. All of you remember because I've been really hammering that in your minds that we use NPV as a primary criterion of valuation. And we said that why do we do that? Well, I will put quote in the correct, and then because it openly deals with value creation, and we know that the value is the key point of corporate finance. And, finally, I would also use another color that, actually, it allows a wide use because we previously concentrated on here, I mean, securities, projects, companies and so on. Now, the idea is that although NPV is not a perfect criterion and if it even if it were a perfect criterion, it would be difficult to perfectly use it, but still, it's sort of the best. Now, I've mentioned that before, we had this special episode early on in discussing the pluses and minuses of certain criteria. And, here, what we will do, I will, first of all, recall some of them. And I will come closer to how people use that, not in real life but rather in corporate life because sometimes we know that another feature of an NPV, it's difficult to say whether it's good or bad. I would say it's good. I would take here the following. I would say this is a long view, and some people like the long view because they say, "Well, this is the way that you can incorporate all possible pluses and all possible pieces of value that accumulate from the future. But sometimes it's difficult and challenging to use that because in real life, people are oftentimes limited, and they have to somehow demonstrate their efficiency and their performance. And they cannot wait until much longer when all the pluses of the NPV approach will come through and will actually be clearly seen. Now, so I would like to spend just a few minutes on recalling of how we can actually recall some problems with NPV. And, again, these problems will not be just the ones that we will say, "This is bad. This is bad." And this is because we are refraining from using NPV. Instead, we are just saying, "This is sort of problematic. This is what has to be watched. This is what, if you do not pay attention to that, might create a problem." So I would put some NPV shortfalls. Well, we know that the first one is that we need good inputs. Well, actually, you can say, "Well, you need good inputs for all kinds of valuation." Well, not exactly. If you use really a very rough approach, then you can say, "Well, you have one or two numbers and that's it." The NPV is comprehensive. It does recognize all the benefits from the future, all the ways how investments feed growth. But if you fed the formulas with really wide range inputs, then the result will not be very much meaningful. Now, another thing, which is here, we can say that it's somewhat cumbersome. I'm not saying it's really difficult to use or so, but it contains formulas, quite a few inputs, and then you have to properly and correctly calculate that. You have to avoid making mistakes. Well, that might sound kind of stupid or even offensive, but even if you do have a clean formula, people oftentimes may just mistype something in their Excel file and then come up with something that which will be very far from reality. Well, other things here, I would say that, well, I could have said that NPV does not recognize options right away. Well, yes and no because it does not recognize them directly, but because present failures are additive, you can easily take an account some potential options in the project and then add the contribution to the project valuation. So I would not put that as a drawback of NPV. But I would say that sometimes, it's sort of difficult to use in corporate life, and that's why I said this is sort of long-term versus short-term emphasis. So, well, again, it is hardly a drawback, but if you have to use something sort of advanced in its logic, and you have to persuade so many people that this is the right way that sometimes cannot be the best way to do it. Because in corporate life, some decision-makers, they may have some other information. They have some other interests or other priorities and, therefore, simplicity and clarity of the approach may be winning point. Well, so that is basically the idea, and I would clearly put it in the red that still NPV is the best. So this is sort of the good news. But in what follows in our next episode, I will give you some sort of corporate life adapted ways of using NPV. Well, I am sort of joking here, and the only reason why we did not discuss these approaches, namely EVA and then MVA, economic value added and market value added, earlier just because they at the point that whether discussed pluses and minuses of valuation criteria. At that time, we were not yet familiar with the idea of rate of return. It was fourth week, and these criteria, they openly use it. So, in the next episode, we will, in the final attempt within this course, discuss some other very close to NPV criteria that are oftentimes used in corporate life.
