You are valuing a new project for your company. The project will produce widgets which sell for $6.50 per widget. The manufacturing cost is $2 per widget. You estimate that the project will sell 2.5M widgets per year for the next four years and then shut down. The project will require you to purchase $3M in machinery which you will depreciate down to zero over four years. The machinery will have a resell value of $400k at the end of the project. You will need $500k in cash set aside for this project at its start, and increase cash holdings by $200k per year for the life of the project. Thefirm's cost of debt is 3.2% and the corporate tax rate is 35%. You will maintain a constant D/V ratio of 0.60 for the project. The expected return of the market is 7% and the risk-free rate is 3%.

To value the project, you have identified three comparable firms listed below. You reside in a country where interest payments to debt holders arenottax deductible.

Firm A has an equity beta of 2.10, D/E ratio of 0.4 and debt beta of 0.16. Firm B has an equity beta of 2.34, D/E ratio of 0.3 and debt beta of 0.12. Firm C has an equity beta of 3.60, D/E ratio of 2.0 and debt beta of 0.24. The average equity beta is 2.68 and average D/E ratio is 0.9.