Shareholder Value

Shareholder value is a business term, sometimes phrased as shareholder value maximization or as the shareholder value model, which implies that the ultimate measure of a company’s success is the extent to which it enriches shareholders. It became prominent during the 1980s and 1990s along with the management principal value-based management or “managing for value“.

Shareholder value is the value delivered to the equity owners of a corporation due to management’s ability to increase sales, earnings, and free cash flow, which leads to an increase in dividends and capital gains for the shareholders.

A company’s shareholder value depends on strategic decisions made by its board of directors and senior management, including the ability to make wise investments and generate a healthy return on invested capital. If this value is created, particularly over the long term, the share price increases and the company can pay larger cash dividends to shareholders. Mergers, in particular, tend to cause a heavy increase in shareholder value.

The term “Shareholder value“, sometimes abbreviated to “SV“, can be used to refer to:

• The market capitalization of a company;
• The concept that the primary goal for a company is to increase the wealth of its shareholders (owners) by paying dividends and/or causing the stock price to increase (i.e. the Friedman doctrine introduced in 1970);
• The more specific concept that planned actions by management and the returns to shareholders should outperform certain bench-marks such as the cost of capital concept. In essence, the idea that shareholders’ money should be used to earn a higher return than they could earn themselves by investing in other assets having the same amount of risk.

Agency theory and shareholder value

Agency theory is the study of problems characterized by disconnects between two cooperating parties: a principal and an agent. Agency problems arise in situations where there is a division of labor, a physical or temporal disconnect separating the two parties, or when the principal hires an agent for specialized expertise. In these circumstances, the principal takes on the agent to delegate responsibility to him. Theorists have described the problem as one of “separation and control”, agents cannot be monitored perfectly by the principal, so they may shirk their responsibilities or act out of sync with the principal’s goals. The information gap and the misalignment of goals between the two parties results in agency costs, which are the sum of the costs to the principal of monitoring, the costs to the agent of bonding with the principal, and the residual loss due to the disconnect between the principal’s interests and agent’s decisions.

Value-based management

As a management principle, value-based management (VBM), or managing for value (MFV), states that management should first and foremost consider the interests of shareholders when making management decisions. Under this principle, senior executives should set performance targets in terms of delivering shareholder returns (stock price and dividends payments) and managing to achieve them.

The concept of maximizing shareholder value is usually highlighted in opposition to alleged examples of CEO’s and other management actions which enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders. Examples of this include acquisitions which are dilutive to shareholders, that is, they may cause the combined company to have twice the profits for example but these might have to be split amongst three times the shareholders. Although the legal premise of a publicly traded company is that the executives are obligated to maximize the company’s profit, this does not imply that executives are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value.

As shareholder value is difficult to influence directly by any manager, it is usually broken down in components, so called value drivers. A widely used model comprises 7 drivers of shareholder value, giving some guidance to managers:

• Revenue
• Operating Margin
• Cash Tax Rate
• Incremental Capital Expenditure
• Investment in Working Capital
• Cost of Capital
• Competitive Advantage Period