VALUE BASED MANAGEMENT: Economic Value Added or Cash Value Added?
Written by Paula Widiastuti, SE, MSM on 8/26/2008by. Fredrik Weissenrieder
Corporate managers now face a period where a new economic framework that better reflects value and profitability must be implemented in their companies. Accounting systems, which has been used up until today, are insufficient and will not stand the challenge from the increasingly efficient capital markets and owners. The increased efficiency at the capital markets requires that capital allocation within companies become more efficient and it is therefore not possible for companies to in the future
allocate capital as inefficient as they do today. A new economic framework, a Value Based Manage-ment framework that better reflects opportunities and pitfalls, is therefore necessary. In my opinion, there are four major frameworks within Value Based Management; Economic Value Added (EVA®1), Cash Value Added (CVA2), Cash Flow Return on Investments (CFROI), and Share-holder Value Analysis (SVA). A company can chose one of these four for their company's economic framework of the future. The choice will have a substantial effect on management resources, strategy choices, and on how investors, analysts, media, etc view the company. This paper will deal with EVA and CVA, the two most frequent concepts in Sweden. Many things are being said about the two frameworks. I will in this paper present my reflections on a few similarities and differences of the two frameworks. In section 2 I will briefly discuss Value Based Management in general. Section 3 discusses the parts of the CVA concept that is necessary for the comparison with EVA. Section 4 discusses the parts of the EVA concept that is necessary for the comparison with CVA. Section 4 will also discuss whether EVA functions as a Value Based Management concept (which is its objective) or just another version of accounting. Section 5 will discuss the alleged necessity, for technical reasons, of basing a Value Based Management tool on accounting which EVA does, contra the possibility of basing it directly on Cash Flow which CVA does. Section 6 further compares EVA to CVA and it discusses the final cor-rections that are necessary to eventually have EVA become a concept that simulates cash flow. Sec-tion 7 will discuss the Market Value Added concept, and then we have the conclusion in section 8. In Appendix 1 I will discuss a company's concept of value from the shareholders' perspective. All figures, graphs and tables in the paper are my own.
I will leave out some interesting aspects in order to keep this paper a paper and not a book, e.g. the problems that we find in accounting's consolidation of multinational corporations, i.e. consolidation effects from inflation and currency effects, which also influence the quality of EVA.
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