Valuation with Multiples: A Conceptual Analysis

Estimating the market price of a company with multiples is common practice. Especially if several multiples are used simultaneously, the bandwidth of value estimates might be wide. The paper aims at narrowing down this bandwidth with a conceptual analysis. I analyze the different ways to average peer multiples, the links between common multiples (‘inter-multiple’ analysis), the relevance of their components (‘intra-multiple’ analysis) and the resulting choice between a bottom-up and a top-down approach for deriving a multiple, and the impact of differing capital structures.