Question: Cascade water Company (CWC) currently has 30,000,000 shares of common stock outstanding that trade at a price of $42 per share. CWC also has 500,000 bonds outstanding that currently trade at $023.38 each. CWC has no preferred stock outstanding nad has an equity bets of 2.639. The risk-free rate is 3.5%, and the market is expected to return 12.52%. The firm's bonds have a 20 year life, a $1,000 per value, a 10% coupon rate, and pay interest semiannually.
CWC is considering adding to its product mix a healthy bottled water geared toward children. The initial outlay for the project is expected to be $3,000,000, which will be depreciated using the straight-line mthod to a zero salvage value, and sales are expected to be 1,250,000 units per year at a price of $1.25 per unit. Variable costs are estimated to be $0.24 per unit, and fixed costs of the project are estimated at $200,000 per year. The project is expected to have a 3-year life and a terminal value (excluding the operating cash flows in year 3) of $500,000. CWC has a 34% tax rate. For the purposes of this project, working capital effects will be ignored. Bottled water targeted at child is expected to have a different risk characteristics from the firms' current products. Therefore, CWC has decided to use the "pure play" approach to evalue this project. After researching the market CWC managed to find two pure play firms. the specifics for those two firms are
Firm Fruity Water Ladybug Drinks
Beta 1.72 1.84
D/E .43 .35
Tax rate 34% 36%
1) Determine the current weighted average cost of capital, cost of equity and the debt to equity ratio for CWC
2) Determine the appropriate discount rate for the healthy bottled water product