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Marriott Corporation - The Cost of Capital (Abridged) The Marriott Corporation is comprised of three major lines of businesses, lodging, restaurants and contract services. In order to decide which projects to take on in these divisions, each year a hurdle rate must be set which they use to discount a project’s cash flow to see if it will be profitable enough. We will conduct an analysis to calculate the hurdle rate for Marriott as a whole and for each division. We will use WACC as the hurdle rate. The results of our analysis show that Marriott’s WACC as a whole is 11,61 %. For lodging, 10,04% and for restaurants 13,03%. These should be the hurdle rates to use when valuating projects. The reason that these values differ is the difference in risk premiums and expected projects, and therefore financing and project lifetimes. We estimated a shorter project lifespan for restaurants than for lodging, since we believe lodging is a long term investment while restaurants and contract services are short term investments. The Marriott Corporation uses its estimate of the cost of capital to select investment projects which would increase the shareholders value by using the appropriate hurdle rates for each division. As is stated on page 2 of the case, a key element of their financial strategy is to invest only in projects that increase shareholders value. This practice makes sense as each division has a different level of risk associated with it and hence the cash flows involved should be discounted at the respective divisional hurdle rate and not at the firm‘s weighted average cost of capital. Marriott was also considering using its estimate of cost of capital to determine the annual incentive compensation, which forms a major chunk of the total compensation. We disagree with this as managers’ performance should be the driving criteria for their bonus and not the divisional

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