Cost of equity

In finance, the cost of equity is the minimum rate of return a firm must offer shareholders to compensate for waiting for their returns, and for bearing some risk.

The cost of equity capital for a particular company is the rate of return on investment that is required by the company's ordinary shareholders. The return consists both of dividend and capital gains, e.g. increases in the share price. The returns are expected future returns, not historical returns, and so the returns on equity can be expressed as the anticipated dividends on the shares every year in perpetuity. The cost of equity is then the cost of capital which will equate the current market price of the share with the discounted value of all future dividends in perpetuity.

The cost of equity reflects the opportunity cost of investment for individual shareholders. It will vary from company to company because of the differences in the business risk and financial or gearing risk of different companies.

The cost of equity is calculated by the following formula:

$$Cost of Equity = \frac{Next Year's Dividends per Share}{Current Market Value of Stock}+ Growth Rate of Dividends$$ <!-- these here are utter mumbo-jumbo describing just what the above formula says. P_0=... is a reformulation of Ke=...

The formula above calculates the cost of equity based on a firm's current rate of return. If one assumes a perfect market, industry-specific costs of equity reflect the riskiness of particular industries. A high cost of equity would then indicate a higher-risk industry that should command a higher return to compensate for the higher risk.