Module 02 · Valuation studio

Reverse DCF Studio

A DCF asks what a business is worth. A reverse DCF asks the harder question: what does the market already believe? Set the discount rate and the fade, and the engine solves for the growth rate hidden inside today’s price.

Blue — assumption you set Black — computed by the engineDouble rule = final figure, as in a working paper
Market is pricing in8.6%free cash flow growth, 10 yrs, fading 5 yrs to 5.0%
at a 11.50% discount rate

Your 10.0% assumption values the equity at

1,655 per share

versus 1,480 in the market — +11.8%

Market cap 6,14,200 · implied EV 5,82,200 (₹ crore)

How this number is derived — step by step

Cash flow schedule — your 10.0% case

YearGrowthFCFFDiscount factorPresent value
110.0%29,1500.896926,143
210.0%32,0650.804425,792
310.0%35,2720.721425,445
410.0%38,7990.647025,103
510.0%42,6790.580324,765
610.0%46,9460.520424,432
710.0%51,6410.466724,103
810.0%56,8050.418623,779
910.0%62,4860.375423,459
1010.0%68,7340.336723,143
119.0%74,9200.302022,624
128.0%80,9140.270821,914
137.0%86,5780.242921,030
146.0%91,7730.217819,992
155.0%96,3610.195418,827
Present value of explicit period3,50,550
Terminal value 15,56,603, discounted3,04,127
Enterprise value6,54,677
Less: net debt32,000
Equity value6,86,677

Terminal value is 46.5% of enterprise value. Above roughly 75%, the valuation is a bet on the perpetuity, not on the forecast — say so before a student reads any signal into year 4.

What changes the market’s implied growth

WACC ↓ / terminal g →4.0%4.5%5.0%5.5%6.0%
9.50%5.7%5.1%4.3%3.5%2.6%
10.50%7.7%7.2%6.6%6.0%5.2%
11.50%9.6%9.1%8.6%8.1%7.5%
12.50%11.3%10.9%10.5%10.0%9.5%
13.50%13.0%12.6%12.3%11.9%11.4%

Every cell prices the same company at the same price. The spread across this grid is the honest width of the answer — the discount rate is an assumption, so “the market expects X%” is always a sentence with a footnote.

Preset figures are illustrative teaching inputs, not live market data. Connect a feed to the four blue inputs and the arithmetic below them does not change.