CST Valuation Matrix

Many of you will be familiar with my "CST Valuation Matrix" spreadsheet that I have been dragging around behind me for several years.


A few people have contacted me asking that I update and re-release it. I have been specifically asked to try to integrate the real figures that we have seen reported for the Company over the last two years. I have made a valiant attempt to do that but, frankly, this spreadsheet has now been stretched well beyond it's usefulness and I anticipate that this will be the last time that I release it. Bear in mind that this spreadsheet was developed waaaaayy back when CST was a totally speculative investment without any significant Sales (or Profits!). I believe that this spreadsheet was of some use back then for playing around with scenarios - that use is much diminished now. 


In doing the above, I have had to take some short cuts and make some gross assumptions.



So, here they are.


Foreign Exchange. It's just too hard to try to factor future foreign exchange factors in. Firstly, the forex rates have been all over the place in recent times (and may well continue to do so) and secondly, we don't really know what strategies the Company is using or will use to deal with currency fluctuations. I therefore took the easy way out and totally deleted any reference to forex - the spreadsheet is now expressed totally in $A.


Selling Price. I knocked the selling price down to $17 - I did that purely for this exercise to make the actual figures for the last two years to fit the spreadsheet. 


Tax. I have assumed a tax rate of 30% for all years/sales volumes.


Gross Margin. I have used a gross margin of 60% which doesn't seem unreasonable at this point, although I would expect this to increase with volume.


Overheads. This is very hard to estimate. I have made wild guesses with this but have tried to make them generous, rather than mean.


The end result of all of the above is a much more conservative valuation that I have shown in the past (or, in truth, believe).


Remember that this spreadsheet is more of a tool than an analysis. I doubt that you would agree with the figures that I currently have in there. You can easily put in the figures that you like.


Have fun!


One final note. I believe that I have managed to program the spreadsheet in such a way that it can be opened in either Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice. 


CST Valuation matrix.


At some point I will try to apply the attention to a future valuation that the task deserves.