From Balance Sheets to Beauty: Valuing L’Oréal’s Acquisition Of Aēsop

Name: From Balance Sheets to Beauty: Valuing L’Oréal’s Acquisition Of Aēsop (English version)
SKU: W50557

Felipe Restrepo, Rebecca Sorgini

Product #:W50557

Supplier:Ivey

Discipline:Finance, International Business

Setting:Australia, Brazil, France, 2023

Details:Case (PDF) • 13 pages • 2026-07-02

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In March 2023, a senior investment analyst was asked to evaluate L’Oréal Group’s potential acquisition of Aēsop, the premium Australian skin care and beauty brand owned by Natura &Co. The case requires students to assess the strategic rationale for the potential acquisition and estimate Aēsop’s value using comparable-company multiples and discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis. The case highlights the distinction between stand-alone value and acquisition value and asks whether a strategically attractive target can justify a price above intrinsic valuation.

Learning Objectives

This case is suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level finance courses covering valuation, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, or investment analysis. It works especially well as a capstone-style case after students have already been introduced to multiples-based valuation, DCF valuation, and weighted average cost of capital (WACC) estimation.

After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:

Assess the strategic rationale of an acquisition by linking industry conditions, target characteristics, and bidder objectives.
Apply comparable-company valuation methods to estimate the implied enterprise value and equity value of a target firm.
Estimate an appropriate discount rate using the WACC in a cross-border acquisition context.
Construct and interpret a DCF valuation using explicit forecast assumptions and terminal value.
Distinguish between stand-alone value and strategic acquisition value, and evaluate whether an acquisition price is likely to create value for the buyer.