Question

McNabb Construction Company is trying to calculate its cost of capital for use in making a capital budgeting decision. Mr. Reid, the vice-president of finance, has given you the following information and has asked you to compute the weighted average cost of capital.

The company currently has an outstanding bond with a 10.8 percent coupon rate and another bond with a 11.5 percent rate. The firm has been informed by its investment dealer that bonds of equal risk and credit ratings are now selling to yield 12.2 percent. The common stock has a price of $99.00 and an expected dividend (D₁) of $4.95 per share. The historical growth pattern (g) for dividends is as follows:

	$3.80
	4.04
	4.31
	4.61

The preferred stock is selling at $90 per share and pays a dividend of $8.50 per share. The corporate tax rate is 35 percent. The flotation cost is 2.9 percent of the selling price for preferred stock. The optimum capital structure for the firm is 25 percent debt, 25 percent preferred stock, and 50 percent common equity in the form of retained earnings.

a. Compute the historical growth rate. (Round intermediate calculations to 2 decimal places. Round the final to 2 decimal places.)

Growth rate             %

b. Compute the cost of capital for the individual components in the capital structure. (Round growth rate to 2 decimal places. Round the final answers to 2 decimal places.)

	Cost of capital
Debt (Kd)	%
Preferred stock (Kp)
Common equity (Ke)	%

c. Calculate the weighted cost of each source of capital and the weighted average cost of capital. (Round your intermediate calculations to 2 decimal places. Round the final answers to 2 decimal places.)

	Weighted Cost
Debt (Kd)	%
Preferred stock (Kp)
Common equity (Ke)
Weighted average cost of capital (Ka)	%

Answer 1

a) Historical growth rate = 6.36%

b) cost of debt = 7.93%, cost of preferred stock = 9.73 %, cost of common equity = 11.36%

c) Weighted cost of debt = 1.98%, Weighted cost of preferred stock = 2.43%, Weighted cost of common equity = 5.68%

Weighted average cost of capital = 10.09