International investment - Treasury, foreign exchange and trade finance

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1 (A), Manchester Metropolitan University Business School (Treasury and Finance), language: English, abstract: To answer this question I will evaluate various possible scenarios, taking into consideration various environmental factors that effect international investment projects. The result will not be 100% certain, but will give an indication of how high the risks are and whether or not they are worth taking.

Assumptions

To begin with a few assumptions have been made which remain true for all of the following scenarios.

Firstly that the French government allows a tax credit upon all taxes paid in Emergia. Further it assumes that the Emergian government will not levy a withholding tax on funds remitted to France. These assumptions have been made due to lack of information to the to simplify the analysis and make it more comparable. Should these not hold then all scenarios evaluated here would have to be adjusted for these points.

Volumes remain stable. This is in order to allow for a conservative evaluation across all models. There is not enough information given to evaluate the prospective market, other than the fact that it is stable. Theoretically a stronger Ziloti would reduce the cost of imported material, possibly allowing for prices to be reduced and thus increase volume whilst also increasing or at least maintaining margins, however such volume effects will not be included here.

Inflation and interest rates have been given as fairly reliable and they will therefore also remain constant throughout the scenarios. However they will both be used to attempt to determine future exchange rates at a later stage.

The salvage value of the plant is a very important cash item. However the offer being made by the Emergian government means that this value will be zero by the time the project closes. This item remains cash ineffective throughout all scenarios, due to the fact that project life and useful life for depreciation purposes match each other precisely.

The low local tax rate of 20% could be changed. But will be assumed as being stable for simplicity and as there are no indications that Emergia wishes to drive FDI out of the country at present.