Company Valuation Methods. The Most Common Errors in Valuations

In this paper, we describe the four main groups comprising the most widely used company valuation methods: balance sheet-based methods, income statement-based methods, mixed methods, and cash flow discounting-based methods. The methods that are conceptually "correct" are those based on cash flow discounting. We will briefly comment on other methods since -even though they are conceptually "incorrect"- they continue to be used frequently. We also present a real-life example to illustrate the valuation of a company as the sum of the value of different businesses, which is usually called the break-up value .