project group mate from hell

my dream reply to an email i got from a project group mate...

andrew i think your interpretations skills need some brushing up to do. you have understood each of my questions in the most incorrect manner possible. but never mind. maybe it was my writing inadequacy.

i had sent out the questions figuring out its better to get doubts cleared than to end up with sub standard reports.

in your year in smu you might have not faced work pressure and hence that explains your reasons for cracking under a tight deadline. wake up and understand that we are not only doing corp reporting.

i feel higly humilliated with your extremely rude reply.

for question 3 i have already gone ahead and done all calculations involving cash. i just wanted to double check.

for question on the cost of equity i was hoping to get the same information from you.

for my question on FCFF i obviously know how to use it and what summation is. thank you for pointing out how dumb i am. my only question was how to calculate it on excell. of you want me to do it manually, just say so. i wasn't aware that excel mastery was a prerequisite for the course.

the next time you send out such a rude email i would advise you clarify matters. another suggestion for you to escape blacklisting for project groups, don't use bold and underlining excessively.

i have attached an excel sheet with the complete relative anaysis done. also it has all the constituent figures for FCFF.

thank you for your kind time and energy towards this project which you seem to be bossing around.

charu

this was the email he sent me

Hi Charu.

Thanks for sounding out to us. We were beginning to wonder where you guys went…

“anyways param and I have worked on our parts and have progressed substantially.”

That’s great news! Then please reply and state what exactly you have done, and which component of the corp project it belongs to.. (E.g. FCFF valuation – Fundamental Valuation, or consolidation – adjustments to financial statements.) Take what u have done and send it along with your reply as attachments, its ok if it is in draft form or halfway done. This is so that we can sitrep and assess where we are now. Do this now please, time is running short. if there are parts assigned to you that you have not started on, please state so.

Answers to your qns:

1. It depends, there is no fixed ans. By right it should be a weighted average of all the companies in the industry, but as that can lead to distortions, sometimes people use normal average instead. In any case, it doesn’t matter, you should be able to find it. Remember that Prof say we can take figures from Thompson banker /Bloomberg/ whatever. Kelvin and Joel, if u know, please assist.
2. Please provide more background information. How did you get your figures? What is the discrepancy? Is the discrepancy significant? Does it matter (for the purposes of corp rep proj)? For which part of the project are you using these figures? Ratios? Which ratios?
3. This question is very worrying.
4. This question is exceedingly worrying. Please don’t take this personally, Charu, it really is nothing personal. But I am very shocked and disturbed at your questions; I don’t think I will be able to sleep tonight. This part has been assigned to you from the very beginning, since the first meeting. You question shows that you totally do not understand, in any capacity, how to do FCFF. That, in itself, is totally fine. What shocks me is that you have waited till less than a week away from submission deadline to sound out. Remember that this component of the proj is a REQUIREMENT. Remember also that you were assigned only this component and parts of relative valuation; already it is a very light workload. If you didn’t know how to do it, shouldn’t you have said so earlier? Ask yourself whether you are being fair to the rest of your groupmates. In my opinion, FCFF (or any of the fundamental valuation models in fact) is probably the easiest part of the entire corp rep project. With the figures from kelvin’s valuation, it should not take anyone more than a couple of hours tops.

The Summation is because u have to sum up each year after u discount them. Summation is used because the denominator increases in power each year (you discount further by one year).

Param - I thought we had agreed that I would take over fundamental Valuation?

Charu – Do not worry about Fundamental Valuation any longer, we will settle it.