“I discovered finance with ‘The Vernimmen’ about 30 years ago. Since then the different versions have accompanied me throughout my career and throughout the world. Not only was the alignment of the successive editions looking good in my different offices but I must confess I have opened and cherished each of them. Whether an investment banker, a CFO in a universal bank or more simply a world banker …”
Bertrand Badre, Former Managing Director and CFO of the World Bank
“What sets the Vernimmen apart from other textbooks is its integration of practice and current affairs in a rigorous theoretical framework. Recipes and pontification are replaced by a scientific approach. And, thanks to the Newsletter, this is done practically in real time!”
Christophe Evers, Professor of Finance at the Solvay Brussels School, Chief Financial Officer at Texaf
“Corporate Finance is a very useful reference book for students and practitioners, it will help both to understand the principles of the financial markets and their practical application in today's complex environment. The book's approach is both logical and sequential and presents some interesting cases that make study easier and more stimulating.”
Gabriele Galateri, Chairman of Generali, former Chairman of Telecom Italia and Mediobanca, former CEO of FIAT
“Vernimmen provided people like me who were new to the world of corporate finance a perfect mix of theory and practical examples to help them develop long-lasting financial concepts. The book is a written manual for finance, explaining the fundamentals in a very thought-provoking way, making it intriguing to delve into the complexities. This book is a must-have in your personal library as you will refer back to it even after years.”
Sharat Gangwani, Head of Research Systems - International Equity, Citadel
“The ‘Vernimmen’ is the perfect reference corporate finance book. I used it in my classes, looked back into it during my internships, use it again now to deep dive into corporate finance for my thesis and know I will keep interacting with it later in my career.”
André Geha, Business Development Manager at Omega Financial Solutions
“Vernimmen's Corporate Finance is an outstanding clear and complete manual, a wonderful merger of practice and theory. Its coverage of the market aspects of corporate finance distinguishes its content, but its treatment of all the material makes it essential reading for the student, financier or industrialist.”
Howard Jones, Senior Research Fellow in Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
“At HEC, Pierre Vernimmen gave me a taste for finance, he taught me the basics. The Vernimmen has been with me throughout my career. It still sits on my desk since I became Chief Executive Officer of Caisse des Dépôts and it is a pleasure to go back to it. Forty years later, I am happy to pay tribute to him here, and to thank his followers for keeping his teaching alive so brilliantly.”
Éric Lombard, Chief Executive Officer of Caisse des Dépôts
“The book itself covers all the important techniques that a financial manager must have in his repertoire of tools. The exposition is clear and concise and, most importantly, relies on commonsense reasoning throughout. This is not a book with obscure formulae, yet is still rigorous and at the same time a model of clarity.”
Richard Roll, Professor Emeritus, Joel Fried Chair in Applied Finance at UCLA Anderson
The Vernimmen remains my bible, the only one updated every year.
Jean-Jacques Guiony, Chief Financial Officer of LVMH
This edition first published 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vernimmen, Pierre, author. | Quiry, Pascal, author. | Le Fur, Yann, author.
Title: Corporate finance : theory and practice / Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Yann Le Fur.
Description: Sixth edition. | Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom : Wiley, 2022. | Includes index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021046901 (print) | LCCN 2021046902 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119841623 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119841647 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119841630 (epub) | ISBN 9781119841654 (obk)
Subjects: LCSH: Corporations—Finance. | Business enterprises—Finance.
Classification: LCC HG4026 (ebook) | LCC HG4026 .V467 2022 (print) | DDC 658.15 23/eng/20211—dc04
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046901
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046902
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © cherezoff/Shutterstock; © Pakin Songmor/Getty Images
Pascal Quiry holds the BNP Paribas Chair in Finance at HEC Paris and he is a founder of an investment fund which specialises in investing in start-ups and unlisted SMEs. He is a former managing director in the M&A division of BNP Paribas where he was in charge of deals execution.
Yann Le Fur is head of the Corporate Finance Group of Natixis Americas after working as an investment banker for a number of years, notably with Schroders, Citi and Mediobanca and as an M&A director for Alstom.
Pierre Vernimmen, who died in 1996, was both an M&A dealmaker (he advised Louis Vuitton on its merger with Moët Hennessy to create LVMH, the world luxury goods leader) and a finance teacher at HEC Paris. His book Finance d'Entreprise was, and still is, the top-selling financial textbook in French-speaking countries and is the forebear of Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice.
This book aims to cover the full scope of corporate finance as it is practised today worldwide.
We are very pleased with the success of the first five editions of the book. It has encouraged us to retain the approach in order to explain corporate finance to students and professionals. There are four key features that distinguish this book from the many other corporate finance textbooks available on the market today:
This book starts with an introductory chapter reiterating the idea that corporate financiers are the bridge between the economy and the realm of finance. Increasingly, they must play the role of marketing managers and negotiators. Their products are financial securities that represent rights to the firm's cash flows. Their customers are bankers and investors. A good financial manager listens to customers and sells them good products at high prices. A good financial manager always thinks in terms of value rather than costs or earnings.
Section I goes over the basics of financial analysis, i.e. understanding the company based on a detailed analysis of its financial statements. We are amazed at the extent to which large numbers of investors neglected this approach during the latest stock market euphoria. When share prices everywhere are rising, why stick to a rigorous approach? For one thing, to avoid being caught in the crash that inevitably follows.
The return to reason has also returned financial analysis to its rightful place as a cornerstone of economic decision-making. To perform financial analysis, you must first understand the firm's basic financial mechanics (Chapters 2). Next you must master the basic techniques of accounting, including accounting principles, consolidation techniques and certain complexities (Chapters 6), based on international (IFRS) standards now mandatory in over 80 countries, including the EU (for listed companies), Australia, South Africa and accepted by the SEC for US listing. In order to make things easier for the newcomer to finance, we have structured the presentation of financial analysis itself around its guiding principle: in the long run, a company can survive only if it is solvent and creates value for its shareholders. To do so, it must generate wealth (Chapters 9 and 10), invest (Chapter 11), finance its investments (Chapter 12) and generate a sufficient return (Chapter 13). The illustrative financial analysis of the Italian appliance manufacturer Indesit will guide you throughout this section of the book.
Section II reviews the basic theoretical knowledge you will need to make an assessment of the value of the firm. Here again, the emphasis is on reasoning, which in many cases will become automatic (Chapters 15): efficient capital markets, the time value of money, the price of risk, volatility, arbitrage, return, portfolio theory, present value and future value, market risk, beta, etc. Then we review the major types of financial securities: equity, debt and options, for the purposes of valuation, along with the techniques for issuing and placing them (Chapters 20).
Section III, is devoted to value, to its theoretical foundations and to its computation. Value is the focus of any financier, both its measure and the way it is shared. Over the medium term, creating value is, most of the time, the first aim of managers (Chapters 26).
In Section IV, “Corporate financial policies”, we analyse each financial decision in terms of:
Such decisions include choosing a capital structure, investment decisions, cost of capital, dividend policy, share repurchases, capital increases, hybrid security issues, etc.
In this section, we draw your attention to today's obsession with earnings per share, return on equity and other measures whose underlying basis we have a tendency to forget and which may, in some cases, be only distantly related to value creation. We have devoted considerable space to the use of options (as a technique or a type of reasoning) in each financial decision (Chapter 32).
When you start reading Section V, “Financial management”, you will be ready to examine and take the remaining decisions: how to create and finance a start-up, how to organise a company's equity capital and its governance, buying and selling companies, mergers, demergers, LBOs, bankruptcy and restructuring (Chapter 40). Lastly, this section presents working capital management, cash management, the management of the firm's financial risks and its operational real estate assets (Chapter 49).
Last but not least, the epilogue addresses the question of the links between finance and strategy.
To make sure that you get the most out of your book, each chapter ends with a summary and a series of problems and questions (over 800 with the solutions provided). We've used the last page of the book to provide a crib sheet (the nearly 1,000 pages of this book summarised on one page!). For those interested in exploring the topics in greater depth, there is an end-of-chapter bibliography and suggestions for further reading, covering fundamental research papers, articles in the press, published books and websites. A large number of graphs and tables (over 100!) have been included in the body of the text and these can be used for comparative analyses. Finally, there is a fully comprehensive index.
www.vernimmen.com provides free access to tools (formulas, tables, statistics, lexicons, glossaries); resources that supplement the book (articles, prospectuses of financial transactions, financial figures for over 16,000 European, North American and emerging countries, listed companies, thesis topics, thematic links, a list of must-have books for your bookshelf, an Excel file providing detailed solutions to all of the problems set in the book); plus problems, case studies and quizzes for testing and improving your knowledge. There is a letterbox for your questions to the authors (we reply within 72 hours, unless, of course, you manage to stump us!). There are questions and answers and much more. The site has its own internal search engine, and new services are added regularly.
A teachers' area provides teachers with free access to case studies, slides and an Instructor's Manual, which gives advice and ideas on how to teach all of the topics discussed in the book.
Since (unfortunately) we can't bring out a new edition of this book every month, we have set up the Vernimmen.com Newsletter, which is sent out free of charge to subscribers via the web. It contains:
Subscribe to www.vernimmen.com and become one of the many readers of the Vernimmen.com Newsletter.
We publish daily comments on financial news that we deem to be of interest, answer questions from web-users and publish finance- and business-related quotes. These could come in useful when preparing for a job interview or serve as food for thought for those of you wanting to take time out and think about what's going on in the corporate and financial world.
We hope that you will gain as much enjoyment from your copy of this book – whether you are a new student of corporate finance or are using it to revise and hone your financial skills – as we have had in editing this edition and in expanding the services and products that go with it.
We wish you well in your studies!
Paris, New York, December 2021
Pascal Quiry Yann Le Fur
A | Annuity factor for N years and an interest rate of k |
ABCP | Asset-Backed Commercial Paper |
ADR | American Depositary Receipt |
AGM | Annual General Meeting |
APT | Arbitrage Pricing Theory |
APV | Adjusted Present Value |
BIMBO | Buy-In Management Buy-Out |
BV | Book Value |
BV/S | Book Value per Share |
CAGR | Compound Annual Growth Rate |
Capex | Capital Expenditures |
CAPM | Capital Asset Pricing Model |
CB | Convertible Bond |
CD | Certificate of Deposit |
CE | Capital Employed |
CFROI | Cash Flow Return On Investment |
COV | Covariance |
CVR | Contingent Value Right |
D | Debt, net financial and banking debt |
d | Payout ratio |
DCF | Discounted Cash Flows |
DDM | Dividend Discount Model |
DECS | Debt Exchangeable for Common Stock; Dividend Enhanced Convertible Securities |
Div | Dividend |
DPS | Dividend Per Share |
EBIT | Earnings Before Interest and Taxes |
EBITDA | Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation |
ECP | European Commercial Paper |
EGM | Extraordinary General Meeting |
EMTN | Euro Medium-Term Note |
ENPV | Expanded Net Present Value |
EONIA | Euro OverNight Index Average |
EPS | Earnings Per Share |
E(r) | Expected return |
ESOP | Employee Stock Ownership Programme |
Euribor | Euro Interbank Offered Rate |
EV | Enterprise Value |
EVA | Economic Value Added |
f | Forward rate |
F | Cash flow |
FA | Fixed Assets |
FASB | Financial Accounting Standards Board |
FC | Fixed Costs |
FCF | Free Cash Flow |
FCFE | Free Cash Flow to Equity |
FCFF | Free Cash Flow to Firm |
FE | Financial Expenses |
FIFO | First In, First Out |
FRA | Forward Rate Agreement |
g | Growth rate |
GAAP | Generally Accepted Accounting Principles |
GDR | Global Depositary Receipt |
i | After-tax cost of debt |
IAS | International Accounting Standards |
IASB | International Accounting Standards Board |
IFRS | International Financial Reporting Standard |
IPO | Initial Public Offering |
IRR | Internal Rate of Return |
IRS | Interest Rate Swap |
IT | Income Taxes |
k | Cost of capital, discount rate |
kD | Cost of debt |
kE | Cost of equity |
K | Option strike price |
LBO | Leveraged Buyout |
LBU | Leveraged Build-Up |
L/C | Letter of Credit |
LIBOR | London Interbank Offered Rate |
LIFO | Last In, First Out |
LMBO | Leveraged Management Buyout |
ln | Naperian logarithm |
LOI | Letter Of Intent |
m | Contribution margin |
MOU | Memorandum Of Understanding |
MTN | Medium-Term Notes |
MVA | Market Value Added |
n | Years, periods |
N | Number of years |
N(d) | Cumulative standard normal distribution |
NA | Not Available |
NAV | Net Asset Value |
NM | Not Meaningful |
NOPAT | Net Operating Profit After Tax |
NPV | Net Present Value |
OTC | Over The Counter |
P | Price |
PBO | Projected Benefit Obligation |
PBR | Price-to-Book Ratio |
PBT | Profit Before Tax |
P/E ratio | Price/Earnings ratio |
PEPs | Personal Equity Plans |
PERCS | Preferred Equity Redemption Cumulative Stock |
PSR | Price-to-Sales Ratio |
P-to-P | Public-to-Private |
PV | Present Value |
PVI | Present Value Index |
QIB | Qualified Institutional Buyer |
r | Rate of return, interest rate |
rF | Risk-free rate |
rM | Expected return of the market |
RNAV | Restated Net Asset Value |
ROA | Return On Assets |
ROCE | Return On Capital Employed |
ROE | Return On Equity |
ROI | Return On Investment |
RWA | Risk-Weighted Assessment |
S | Sales |
SEC | Securities and Exchange Commission |
SEO | Seasoned Equity Offering |
SPV | Special Purpose Vehicle |
STEP | Short-Term European Paper |
t | Time |
T | Time remaining until maturity |
Tc | Corporate tax rate |
TSR | Total Shareholder Return |
UCITS | Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities |
V | Value |
VD | Value of Debt |
VE | Value of Equity |
V(r) | Variance of return |
VAT | Value Added Tax |
VC | Variable Cost |
WACC | Weighted Average Cost of Capital |
WC | Working Capital |
y | Yield to maturity |
YTM | Yield To Maturity |
Z | Scoring function |
ZBA | Zero Balance Account |
β or βE | Beta coefficient for a share or an equity instrument |
βA | Beta coefficient for an asset or unlevered beta |
βD | Beta coefficient of a debt instrument |
σ(r) | Standard deviation of return |
ρ(A, B) | Correlation coefficient of return between shares A and B |