As a financial advisor at RedHat International (RHI), you have been asked to evaluate two capital investment alternatives submitted by the shipping department. Before beginning your analysis, you note that company policy has set the minimum desired rate of return at 16% for all proposed projects. You also learn that the corporate tax rate is 22%.

The proposed capital project calls for the shipping department to fully automate a warehouse using one of two different advanced robotics systems. System A will incur development costs of $2,400,000. System B will cost $3,800,000 to develop. Both systems will be capitalized and amortized using a CCA rate of 20%. In addition, the firm believes that Net Working Capital will rise by $40,000 at time zero and then by an additional $10,000 at the end of each year for each year that the new system is operating (except at the end of the final year of the project). This applies to both alternatives. However, all of the increase in Net Working Capital will be recovered at the end of the project.

If the new automated robotics system is put into use, the pre-tax cost savings each year are estimated as follows:

Year	System A	System B
1	$1,400,000	$2,000,000
2	$1,200,000	$1,650,000
3	$1,100,000	$1,450,000
4	$ 975,000	$1,200,000
5	$ 950,000	$1,100,000

Figure 1

1. the CFO is concerned that a change in technology might make the new system obsolete after three years. If this occurs and you only obtain three years of cost savings (as per Figure 1 above) and no salvage value, which alternative would you now recommend?