Competitive Analysis for Firm Valuation ─ The Missing Link Between Strategy and Corporate Finance

In competitive markets, a company’s tangible – i.e. physical and financial – assets play only a modest part in generating the overall value of the business. In fact, value for shareholders is generated mainly through a company’s strategic management of its distinctive, intangible resources; namely its human, intellectual, social, symbolic and organisational capital. The efficient mobilisation of these intangible resources within an organisation contributes enormously to its current value and competitive advantage. In addition, analysis of a firm’s historical management of its intangible assets provides useful insights into how that firm is likely to adapt – or fail to adapt – to future changes in its environment; a key indicator of its likely future success and value. In current valuation techniques, these strategic, organizational elements are largely neglected in favour of numerical and algorithmic methods of firm valuation. When used in isolation from knowledge of the firm itself and the market in which it operates, these methods are risky abstractions, providing estimates which are incomplete at best, and, at worst, dangerously inaccurate.

Competitive Analysis for Firm Valuation closes the gap between strategy and finance, and shows how to value a company using a combination of the traditional approach with a sound understanding of the economic and organizational mechanisms which underpin the creation of a firm’s value. The reader will be shown how to combine modern corporate finance with economic, strategic and organizational theories, in order to make sound, holistic valuation assumptions, and obtain reliable and credible estimates of a firm’s true value.