Creating Wealth for Shareholders: Evaluating the Performance of the Malaysia Property Companies

This paper measures property companies’ performance under new economic performance metric known as Economic Value Added (EVA) and identifies which companies perform better. The EVA of 27 Malaysia property companies are computed and analysed during the periods of 1997 through 2006. The EVA is an economic performance metric proposed by Stern Stewart Management Services. It claims to have successfully eliminated financial and accounting distortions and provides a true measure of a company’s success in driving shareholder value. Overall, the result of the present study shows that most property companies in Malaysia fail to generate enough income to cover their cost of capital, and thus indicating failure in creating corporate wealth. In order to have positive EVA in the future, firms must improved their strategic and scenario planning. In realizing this, management should focus more on investing capital in the high return projects and at the same time improving on optimal capital structure.