会计外文翻译--转型经济中的研发和企业绩效

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1、 原文 Financial Management of R&D Financial thinking about R&D has evolved well beyond basic discounted cash flow models. Better tools have been developed to value intellectual capital, including the quantitative assessment of the value added by R&D. The dissection of the elements of risk and the appl

2、ication of real options theory are new features of the R&D landscape. Financing vehicles have also changed with an enormous surge of venture capital and private equity funds. The analysts toolbox has been enhanced by electronic spreadsheets, on-line databases, Monte Carlo software, the Internet, and

3、 the ubiquitous personal computer. Industrial R&D is characteristically a high-risk investment with a deferred payoff. Its importance to industrial societies, and to individual firms within these economies, is paramount；Lau has estimated that more than 50% of the wealth creation in developed countri

4、es originates from technology, which is typically a product of R&D. However, R&D comes at a cost, and it is as capable of destroying value as creating it. Knowing the difference is crucial； the penalties for underinvestment can be a deteriorating competitive position and lost opportunity； for overin

5、vestment it will be a slow erosion of the firms capital base. But measuring the difference between value creation and value destruction is not easy. One source of confusion is that accounting conventions treat R&D as an expense, not an investment. An even more fundamental issue is that past performa

6、nce is not a reliable guide to future performance. Faced by a measurement problem that is both difficult and important, the business financial and academic communities have continued improving their tools. As a result, R&D analysis and management has evolved dramatically in the past fifty years (3),

7、 and that evolution is far from over. In its first postwar phase, industrial R&D was viewed as a creative enterprise and Its management was left to the R&D directors. Their main financial metric was an annual budget (a tool basically inadequate to evaluate an investment). The budget was in part dete

8、rmined by industry benchmarks, such as R&D expense as a percentage of revenues. Accordingly, the financial skills of R&D executives were largely focused on cost accounting and cost control (4).In many companies, top management(often lacking personal experience in R&D)didnt have a clue about the rela

9、tionship of value to cost, and attempted to manage the function by a process that has been pithily described(5)as managing the manager. In other words, poor R&D returns were viewed more as a product of poor management than a consequence of a firms strategy .The solution was often to hire a new boy.

10、The second phase, in the 1970s, was the introduction of increasingly powerful tools for evaluating investments under risk being adopted by financial analysts to R&D, leading to a circumstance I would describe as the apparent triumph of DCF (Discounted Cash Flow).The use of DCF in evaluating investme

11、nts was an important step forward in that it introduced the discipline of business plans, factored in the concept of risk, and helped bridge the communications gap between technical and non-technical executives. The DCF toolkit included net present value (NPV) internal rate of return (IRR) and risk

12、weighted cost of capital. But as it was applied in practice, the use of excessive discount rates and overly conservative terminal values combined to condemn almost any long-term R&D. project. This result contradicted industrys common experience that many of the most profitable innovations had long g

13、estation periods. The word value has become a fixture of the business lexicon during the past two decades. Unfortunately, this omnipresent word is being used in two very different contexts: economic value and market value. The two forms of value are not at all the same. The distinction is profound f

14、or R&D, because innovation initially comes at a cost ion economic value, but is equally often a driver for market value! Economic Value The term Economic Value is invoked in much current business jargon, explicitly In such concepts as Economic Value Added (EVA), and implicitly in discussions of valu

15、e chains, and value propositions. The economic value of an enterprise is determined by the projected sum of its free cash flows, discounted by its cost of capital. The EVA concept, although traceable to Albert P. Sloan, the legendary CEO of General Motors, was reintroduced to the corporate community

16、 by the firm Stern Stewart in the 1990s, with considerable impact. EVA is defined as net operating profit minus an appropriate charge for the opportunity cost of all capital invested in the Enterprise. (The relationship between EVA and Economic Value is simple: Economic Value is just the sum of the

17、EVAs added by the enterprise in each successive year.) EVA is an estimate of true economic profit, or the amount by which earnings exceed or fall short of the required minimum rate of return that shareholders and lenders might earn by investing in alternative securities of comparable risk. The Crisi

18、s in Valuation； When Market Value Didnt Track Market Value For professional investors in securities, the bottom line is not economic return, it is total shareholder return (TSR), defined as the appreciation of the stock price plus dividend payments. This is cash is king reasoning, since liquid secur

19、ities and cash dividends mean cash to an investor. To money managers, total return is also their report card. In such a world, the Market Value of a stock is the final metric, and Economic Value is but one component of it. Investors also gauge each firms strategic position, plus other factors contri

20、buting to Market Value such as investor sentiment and macroeconomic trends. Shareholder value has largely come to be synonymous with current market value-stock price-and executives or directors who ignore this reality do so at considerable peril. Economic Value A part of the crisis in valuation aros

21、e from the growing differences between market value and the accountants perspective of valuation based on historical cost. While this circumstance could, in principle, have resulted from smart management delivering superior cash flows, this explanation did not hold up when the actual cash flow projections of the companies were considered. Young is based on cash flow anticipated in the next five years-the outer limit of the