Explain method to analyze and to value seasonal businesses

Question

Are there any methods to analyze and to value seasonal businesses?

Answer 1

Seasonal businesses can be valued through discounting flows using yearly data, but this needs some adjustments. The right way to value the flows is using the monthly data. Fernández (as 2003 and 2004) demonstrates that errors because of the utilization of annual data are significant. When using annual data, the computations of the value of the unlevered company and of the value of tax shields should be adjusted. Conversely, the debt we have to subtract in order to compute the value of the shares does not require any adjustment.

By using the average debt and the average of the working capital needs does not give a good approximation of the value of the company. Here not much emphasis on the impact of seasonality in company valuation as: Damodaran (1994), Myers and Brealey (2000), Penman (2001) and Copeland (2000) do not even comprise the terms “seasonal” or “seasonality” in their indexes.