corporate-finance-masterclass-riyadh-may



Practical Corporate Finance Masterclass  

The Fundamentals and Foundation to Guide Better Corporate Financial Decisions

25-27 May 2025 in Riyadh

We’ve designed this course for finance and accounting professionals, seeking greater perspective and an enhanced understanding of the underlying principles of corporate financial decision-making, and methodology and practices of investment and financing decisions. 

Attendees for this course will typically be working in following roles:

  • CFOs, Controllers, Treasurers, Finance Managers, and Financial Analysts
  • Planning and Strategy professionals
  • Investment and Corporate Bankers
  • Appreciate the Big Picture of corporate finance decision-making.
  • Investigate value creation as the primary corporate objective.
  • Tie your strategic decision-making to value creation. 
  • Understand robust and widely-practiced investment valuation techniques.
  • Master and apply simple, tested, rules of thumb consistently.
  • Learn the principles and practices of capital structure decision-making.
  • Understand debt structure and financing choices that companies make.
  • Calculate robust discount rates in environments where data is elusive.
  • Relate accounting to corporate finance decision-making.
  • Apply practical decision-making criteria within the context of your local markets.
Ability to drive value is at the core of successful corporate management. Any business decision must be evaluated for its impact on shareholder value. An appreciation of what drives value is, therefore, necessary. In this intensive course, we will explore three corporate financial decisions that companies face to create value for its shareholders: 1) which investments to make, 2) how to fund those investments, and 3) what proportion of profits to distribute as dividends.

We will learn that the determinants of value are a company’s ability to generate cash and the inherent timing of and risk to cash flow. We will weave a thorough understanding of how corporate financing decisions impact value, including in the context of the idiosyncrasies of emerging economies.  Leveraging these insights, we develop and demonstrate a valuation methodology flexible enough to deal with a variety of business models. For privately-owned companies, particularly valuable is discussion of a comprehensive approach to calculating the cost of capital. We will also discuss how companies make capital structure and financing choices. 

Throughout the course we explore how key strategic and financial decisions impact value. By design we begin with basic concepts, building a common intuitive understanding of foundational principles, and as we progress to completion, challenge attendees’ enhanced understanding.

1. Primary Corporate Financial Decisions

Defining investment needs.
Examining how to fund investments.
Determining how dividends should be distributed.

2. Foundational Principles

Value maximization as the goal.
Centrality of opportunity cost of capital.
A comprehensive dialog about risk and its determinants.
Risk and cost of capital in the context of financial leverage.
How Present Value quantifies underlying drivers of value.
Understanding, simplifying, and communicating the NPV rule.
How strategic competitive advantage relates to NPV.
Inherent flaws in using IRR.
Constructing and deconstructing multiples with fundamental data.

3. Investment Decision-Making

TThree perspectives of Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) valuation.
Defining and measuring cash flow.
Matching cash flow with discount rates.
Why valuation of equity cash flow may be error prone.
How to best capture the effects of financing on valuation.
Adjusted Present Value (APV) approach to individually value business and financing effect.
Financing effects in the context of different tax structures.
Argument for disregarding financing effects in base valuation.
Building a financial statements-driven framework to model cash flow.
Forecast horizon and terminal values.
Sensitivity analysis.

4. Capital Structure, Financing Choices and Dividend Policy

Principles of capital structure.
Pecking order of financing
Trade-off theory of capital structure.
Optimal capital structure in the context of global tax regulations.
High leverage as a disciplinary tool.
“Dry Powder” strategy.
Credit ratings.
Debt structure in light of debt types.
Bank debt versus bonds.
Liquidity needs and cash balance.
Dividend policy overview.

5. Opportunity Cost of Capital

Framework for calculating cost of capital in emerging economies.
Estimating betas for private entities and business units with pure play approach.
Capturing leveraged risk in equity beta.
Measuring market risk premium.
Adjustments for risk by country.
Why using Unlevered Cost of Equity may be preferable to WACC.
Fama-French 3- and 5-factor models.

6. Relating Accounting to Value 

Integrating cost of capital to measure Economic Value Added.
Equivalence of cash flow and Econiomic Value Added.
Disaggregation of valuation into Current Operations and Future Growth Values.
Reversing the valuation into performance expectations, for business planning and target-setting.

7. Strategic Transactions

M&A and divestitures as strategic tools.
Initial Public Offerings (IPO).
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