Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization
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Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization |
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EBITDA |
Summary of Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. Abstract |
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization came into wide use among private capital firms calculating what to pay for a business.
The private capital firms that originally employed it as a useful valuation tool removed interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization from their earnings calculations in order to replace them with their own presumably more precise numbers:
- They removed Taxes and Interest because they wanted to substitute their own tax-rate calculations and the financing costs they expected under a new capital structure.
- Amortization was excluded because it measured the cost of intangible assets acquired in some earlier period, including goodwill, rather than any current expenditure of cash.
- Depreciation, an indirect and backward-looking measure of capital
expenditure, was excluded and replaced with an estimate of future capital
expenditure.
Later, many public companies, analysts and journalists have urged investors
to also use EBITDA as a measure of the cash public companies generate.
It is often compared to cash flow because it rightfully adds back to net
income two major expense categories that have no impact on cash:
depreciation and amortization.
Yet it is a very poor and even misleading mechanism if it is used to approximate cash flows of public companies! Why?
1. It excludes taxes and interest, which are real cash items and not at all optional—a company must obviously pay its taxes and loans.
2. On the other hand, it does not exclude all non-cash items, only depreciation and amortization. Among the non-cash items not adjusted for in EBITDA are bad-debt allowances, inventory write-downs, and the cost of stock options granted.
3. Unlike proper measures of cash flow, it ignores changes in working capital. Additional investments in working capital consume cash.
4. Finally, the main flaw of it is in the E (Earnings). If a public company has over- or under-reserved for warranty costs, restructuring expenses, or bad-debt allowances, its earnings will be skewed and its EBITDA misleading. If it has recognized revenue prematurely or disguised ordinary costs as capital investments, its numbers are suspect. If it has inflated revenue through round-trip asset trades, the E is of no informational value.
Financial Value
Cash Flow
Traditional Income Measure
(Residual Income Component)
Net Sales
- Operating Expenses
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Operating Profit (EBIT)
+ Depreciation Expenses
+ Amortization Expenses
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EBITDA
Book: Steven M. Bragg - Business Ratios and Formulas : A Comprehensive Guide
Book: Ciaran Walsh - Key Management Ratios
| 👀 | TIP: On this website you can find much more about EBITDA! |
Compare with EBITDA: EBIT | P/E Ratio | Economic Value Added | Economic Margin | Cash Ratio | Current Ratio | Earnings Per Share | Return on Equity | Return on Invested Capital | Market Value Added | CFROI | Fair Value | TSR | Relative Value of Growth
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