Executive Summary Tokyo Disneyland opened to the public on April 15, 1983. This amusement park was owned and operated by an unrelated Japanese company. The Walt Disney Company received royalties, paid in yen, on some revenues generated by Tokyo Disneyland. This new overseas business venture was causing some concern for Disney regarding currency risk. Disney management has been considering hedging future yen inflows from Disney Tokyo since 1985. Mr. Anderson, chief financial officer of the Walt Disney Company, has focused his attention on a possible 15 billion ten-year loan with a interest of 7.5% paid semi-annually. On the other hand, Goldman Sachs, which has been working with Disney on this problem, presents a rather unusual but potentially attractive solution: Disney could issue Eurobonds in ECUs and exchange them for a liability in Yen. Goldman Sachs advised them to create a yen liability by exchanging 10-year ECU Eurobonds for a sinking fund, the overall costs of which were denominated in yen. As financial advisors, Walt Disney management asked us to provide an evaluation of this alternative to the company for this financing decision. For this estimate we examined data from the consolidated income statements from 1982 to 1983, the consolidated balance sheets for 1984 and 1983, the historical summary of the average yen/dollar exchange rates and price indices, the ECU/yen swap flows over the following ten years, Long-Term Foreign Currency Yen, Cash Flow of 10-Year ECU Eurobonds with Sinking Fund (Figure 6), and also the list of outstanding publicly traded Eurobonds of the French company. We used internal rate of return analysis to evaluate each alternative. If Goldman's swap solution were adopted, Disney's financing cost would be 7.004% in yen (9.979% in dollars). If the 10-year loan were adopted, the total effective cost would be 7.748% in yen (10.694% in dollars). Furthermore, with this data we also determined the total expected future revenue under different growth rate assumptions and found that it could cover all future interest expenses over the next ten years. We recommend that Walt Disney management ACCEPT the Goldman solution to create 10-year ECU Euro bonds with sinking fund and swap with the French entity as this indirect yen financing has a smaller XIRR, meaning it would be a cost lower financing than a similar 10-year yen loan.
tags