An Empirical Study of Country Risk Adjustments to Market Multiples Valuation in Emerging Markets: the Case for Russia

Abstract

Valuation in emerging markets is always a challenge. The existence of sovereign risk and capital market segmentation as well as small trading volumes and narrow domestic capital market make it difficult to identify peer companies for market multiples valuation without cross- border comparables. This paper investigates the practical implementation of market multiples valuation in emerging markets when the analyst should involve peer companies from developed markets. Companies with comparable operational parameters bear different values on different financial markets. The problem of unavoidable difference among national stock markets exists, that is why methods of cross-border multiples’ corrections are called for. We address cross-border corrections procedures for adjusting multiples to a sovereign risk to find out the role and the extent of these type of adjustments in valuation. We are using the samples of Russian and US companies to test three different adjustments’ techniques: the sovereign spread, the relative market coefficients and the regression approach.