在过去十年中，你难以错过的趋势之一一直在跨越所有市场的估值。发达国家和新兴，公平和信贷，公共和私人私人的一切都是不可否认的。
在私人市场，最常见的平均估值衡量标准称为EBITDA多数。与公共股票的价格到收益比例类似，该数字衡量了相对于其潜在收益的业务的资本化或价格，在这种情况下，特定的公制称为EBITDA，或利息前的收益，税收，贬值和摊销。正如我们在下面的图表所示，EBITDA倍数继续达到新的高位，平均买入交易在2019年上半年大约11倍的EBITDA交易。
But what exactly is EBITDA?
EBITDA is a normalized earnings measure, and it helps compare businesses with different capital structures, taxes, and non-cash expenses. Controlling for such non-operating differences is supposed to make comparisons of the actual profit potential of different underlying business easier and more meaningful. It’s also a helpful number for lenders, since it’s a rough approximation of a company’s debt service capacity.
That is, if the number is any good.
Private companies are by definition not listed on an exchange, which means their earnings aren’t subject to the same type of regulations and standardization as are public companies. Often, EBITDA is heavily inflated by a number of questionable adjustments.
Many private companies are still owned by the founders, who pay themselves above market salaries and run personal expenses such as rental cars, club memberships, and excessive travel and entertainment expenses through the corporate accounts. However, when they go to sell the business, they want the firm to be valued on earnings above those expenses, so they will present adjusted numbers to potential suitors. The justification is that when the business is run more commercially, those expenses will not be there going forward, so they get added back into the earnings.
更令人难以贬值的是为了获得未来的协同效应，或增加可能通过并购出来的其他成本。有时，管理层也试图增加收入假设，因为最近投资进入新设备或植物扩展。如果你建造它，那就假装钱已经来了。
In short, EBITDA is pretty much just a made up number at this point, whatever management wants it to be. And part of negotiating a private transaction today isn’t just figuring out whether or not the appropriate multiple should be ten or eleven times, but what EBITDA actually is. PE funds are having to work harder and harder on the buy, arguing, for instance, that earnings aren’t actually $5 million, but instead should be more like $3.5 million, while at the same time still trying to win the deal. If they push too hard, they are liable to lose out to a less discerning purchaser.
After years of hearing very little about this peculiar piece of financial arcana, so far this year we’ve had four different funds complain to us — unprovoked — about how bad the shenanigans have gotten in recent deals. According to data from the S&P’s Leverage Commentary and Data unit, over the last six months, a record percentage, a full 43 percent, of syndicated loan issues — loans that are often used to finance LBO transactions — contained such EBITDA adjustments.
And the S&P report also showed that for lower-quality credits, the amount of number fudging is even worse. Nearly half of the total earnings reported by companies rated single B were attributable to these so-called add-backs. For higher-rated BB credits, the above-mentioned adjustments only overstated income by 21%. Still, that’s a meaningful bump.
However, a great deal of private companies can’t access the broadly syndicated loan market for financing. Most of the middle market and all of the small market generally use more bespoke forms of lending from banks or private credit funds, often with higher interest rates attached. For these companies, it’s a bit harder to estimate the impact of these embellishments, but it seems likely that the majority of transactions have add-backs embedded in earnings to some degree. A 20 percent to 30 percent impact is probably a reasonable assumption for the scale of the effect.
If these adjustments were properly accounted for, then leverage levels for most private equity deals would be closer to 7.5x EBITDA instead of 6.0x, and the average total valuation across the industry would be more like 12.5x versus the current headline numbers of 11.0x. Even in a world inured to rising valuations, that back-of-the-envelope calculation should be sobering.
这就是为什么据报道，为什么伯克希尔·伯希尔·赫达韦伊曾经说过，“我认为每次看到EBITDA这个词，你就应该替代”废话“的收益这个词。”也许是新缩略词对于这种特殊的可疑度量标准的时候了。我会提出以下内容：完全伪造的收入，完全没有准确性。