INVESTMENT APPRAISAL TECHNIQUES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS BY FINANCE/ INVESTMENT HOUSES (A CASE OF UNION BANK PLC ENUGU URBAN)

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF STUDY

The efficient allocation of capital is the most important finance function in modern time. It involves decision to commit a firm’s fund to the long-term assets. Such decision are of considerable importance to a firm or business organization since they tend to determine value and size by influencing its growth profitability and risk.

Investment appraisal as it is sometimes called is a means of assessing whether capital expended on (or allocated to) a project would show a satisfactory rate of return to an undertaking either absolutely or when compared with expenditure on alternative project and of indicating the optimum time to invest. To be above to give an efficient decision on investment profitability the analysts would require stick come in the evaluation process.

All possible system of achieving this need are to be brought into consideration and bearing in mind attendant merits and demerits of each system or techniques relating some to the circumstance of individual project. He analyst should also be well equipped as to giving a reliable appraisal of such investment proposals.

The implication therefore is the investment appraisal or evaluation can be carried out by more than one system or technique each possessing a particular merits and demerits which result in their respective feature and conditions for evaluation. The cause of these individual feature merits demerits etc is the peculiar method (strategy) adopted by a particular system technique. This in the evaluation process the analyst would need to consider the nature and condition of my given project (investment) so as to know which of the techniques will appropriately be in match and after all be used in the appraisal process since it will give the most reliable appraisal criterion or basis.