How far off is Insight Enterprises, Inc. (NASDAQ:NSIT) from its intrinsic value? Using the most recent financial data, we'll take a look at whether the stock is fairly priced by estimating the company's future cash flows and discounting them to their present value. This will be done using the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. Before you think you won't be able to understand it, just read on! It's actually much less complex than you'd imagine.
Companies can be valued in a lot of ways, so we would point out that a DCF is not perfect for every situation. For those who are keen learners of equity analysis, the Simply Wall St analysis model here may be something of interest to you.
We are going to use a two-stage DCF model, which, as the name states, takes into account two stages of growth. The first stage is generally a higher growth period which levels off heading towards the terminal value, captured in the second 'steady growth' period. To start off with, we need to estimate the next ten years of cash flows. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren't available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.
A DCF is all about the idea that a dollar in the future is less valuable than a dollar today, and so the sum of these future cash flows is then discounted to today's value:
US$282.9m | US$383.0m | US$379.0m | US$379.6m | US$383.4m | US$389.4m | US$397.2m | US$406.2m | US$416.2m | US$427.1m | |
Analyst x3 | Analyst x1 | Est @ -1.04% | Est @ 0.16% | Est @ 0.99% | Est @ 1.58% | Est @ 1.99% | Est @ 2.27% | Est @ 2.47% | Est @ 2.61% | |
US$261 | US$327 | US$299 | US$276 | US$258 | US$242 | US$228 | US$215 | US$203 | US$193 |
("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)
= US$2.5b