Valuation of innovative companies

The movements on international stock markets were characterised by uncommonly high fluctuations during the last years, and the shooting rise and the subsequent fall of the new economy testified the uselessness of traditional methods for the valuation of innovative companies. The focus of the thesis is the development of a new valuation model that considers the specific risk factors of innovative companies, and its subsequent empirical application. After a broad overview on different valuation approaches, the new valuation model is developed and described in full details. The model is characterised by stochastic definitions of certain value drivers that lead to a stochastic distribution of periodic free cash flows as input parameters for the calculation of the present company value. Based on Porter’s concept of five competitive forces, different industry specific parameters are implemented into the model. Additionally, the expected frequency of bankruptcy is considered separately. The empirical analysis covers the valuation of twenty-one innovative companies of three different industry sectors. The findings of the analysis clearly demonstrate the option like characteristics of the examined companies, which are expressed in the asymmetric probability distributions that describe the company values. From the results, it can be concluded that the new approach is an appropriate tool to handle the asymmetric risk profile of innovative companies, and consequently may be applied for the valuation of all companies.