Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

System Requirements:
Pentium II PC or greater
Windows 98 or later
128MB RAM
20MB Hard Disk Space
Excel 97 / 2000 (Alone or part of Office 97 / 2000) w/Report Manager & Analysis ToolPak installed and enabled.
(Note: Formulas & Computations are not guaranteed in later versions of Excel)
Video Display: 800 x 600 recommended

Average Customer Rating:

Book should be renamed determining a company's value purely on the basis of its past cash flow

Customer Rating:

This is a good intro to give the basics of valuation for "old economy" businesses. It determines the valuation of companies based almost exclusively on their cash flow over the previous few years (i.e., 3, 5 and 7 year periods) to the analysis. Unfortunately it ignores (completely) too many issues that play an extremely important role in valuation. For example, the quality, background, knowledge of management, the products the company manufactures, the markets for these products, macroeconomic conditions, intellectual property, market position (i.e., oligopolistic? Is entry/exit difficult in the industry?). Not one of these issues is even touched upon!!! The authors seem to be implying that these issues are irrelevant!! Only the cash flow over the previous few years applied forward (i.e., discounted for present value) matters according to the book!!! Perhaps this type of mentality explains why the overwhelming majority of mergers and acquistions fail!!!! If you are looking purely for a way to use past cash flows to determine a company's "value" this is the book for you. If you are looking for a discussion of just about any other factor affecting valuation, forget it.

Nothing spectacular

Customer Rating:

Unfortunately, for all the name brand that this book conveys, I think the cover seems to be the most intriguing part. There are much better ways for book peddling and the fact that a firm such as McKinsey allowed their name on the title of a book for the sake of a few sales, boggles this readers mind. The subject matter seems to be along the lines of the bull session with all bull and no session. No actual quantitative analysis is used throughout the book, and if anything more than an encyclopedic definition is learned from this book, I would be astounded. Save some money and go search online for some basic books on beginning valuation. By the way, those giving 5 stars either can't read English very well or are shills for McKinsey.

Good but bad Excel support

Customer Rating:

I liked this book. In Russia it is one of the most popular books on valuatuion. But when I can get the perfect excel support for Investment Valuation by Aswath Damodaran or good web support for Valuation Methods and Shareholder Value Creation by Pablo Fernandez, I ask the authors, why don't they put supporting material in disk? I think that the price of their sowtware ($94.50) is too high compairing with the book ($56 with discount), because there is no supporting materials - only 1 spreadsheet (from my point of view does not conform to McKinsey, as the leader of consulting business). I hope, for the 4-th edition we will have a good excel support.

User-unfriendliness at its best

Customer Rating:

Hmm I wonder if those giving this book five stars actually work for McKinsey. As a practioner, I don't know anyone in the industry who has actually read this book. It looks impressive on the bookshelf, but the content is anything but impressive. A lot of topics are covered, but each one only superficially and the writing is extremely dry and boring. I actually found reading this volume *painful*, and I'm supposed to like this stuff since I do it for a living! My advice for any potential buyer is read a few chapters first before you shell out for it.

Logic jumps

Customer Rating:

This book is useful if you're already quite familiar with common valuation methods and can fill in the jumps & gaps. However, if any of the areas you're looking at is new to you or if you would like a more logical, well-reasoned approach or simply a discussion of all the various valuation methods in use, buy Damodaran's text instead. This book was the prescribed & provided reference in the Corporate Finance department I worked in but most of my colleagues and I purchased our own copies of Damodaran's text "Investment Valuation, Wiley, Aswath Damodaran", which is superior in breadth as well as logical description of valuation processes.