Internal rates of return and shareholder value creation

Abstract We propose a genuinely internal approach to project valuation and decision based on the average Return On Investment (ROI), obtained as the ratio of total operating profit (NOPAT) to total invested capital or, equivalently, as the ratio of net cash flow to total invested capital. The approach presented enables decomposing the economic value created into the project scale (total capital invested) and the economic efficiency, obtained as the difference between average ROI and a suitably adjusted weighted average cost of capital (WACC). We show that a project’s average ROI is equal to the weighted mean of the average Return On Equity (ROE) (total net income divided by total equity capital) and the average Return On Debt (ROD) (total interest expenses to total debt outstanding) and show that the average ROE itself correctly measures shareholder value creation when compared with a suitably adjusted cost of equity. We show that the internal average-based approach presented is also valid under the more general assumption of time-varying cost of capital.