Group Conclusions: Apple iTV

All of the numbers below were extracted from your emails to me� So, I bear no responsibility for strange looking numbers or outliers�. That said, here is the bottom line.

On return on capital, the distribution of values was as follows:

The median return on capital was about 12%, with a substantial range on the estimates.

On cost of capital, the numbers looked as follows:

Not surprisingly, a much tighter estimate on values. My guess is that the outliers here can be explained by the use of the company�s beta (for the really high numbers) or book value of equity in computing cost of capital (for the lower numbers). The median cost of capital was about 11%.

On the NPV for the finite life case, the distribution of values was as follows:

The median NPV was positive but a large proportion (about 40%) had negative net present values.

Things did look brighter when you considered the longer life scenario:

Only a handful of analyses had negative net present values and the median was almost $ 2 billion.

Based upon all this number crunching, your decision on whether to invest or not to invest could be categorized as follows:

NPV results                                                     % of groups                            Decision

+�ve for both finite and longer life                  52%                             Invest: 100%

                                                                                                            Do not: 0%

+�ve for longer life, -ve for finite                    38%                             Invest: 40%

                                                                                                            Do not invest: 40%    

                                                                                                            Invest and don�t: 20%

-ve for both scenarios                                      10%                             Do not invest: 100%

 

No matter what you concluded, thank you for putting in the effort that you obviously did� I truly appreciate it.