Net Present Value (NPV)

This is why all companies will take this one step further and establish an IRR hurdle (much higher than 10%) and make the investment if it meets that threshold.

The fact that the number is positive is the indication it is earning in excess of 10% - an investment earning exactly 10% would have a $0 NPV.

When using the hurdle rate method, it is still good to use NPV as well, as there is a danger of making inefficient decisions. For an extreme example, a $1 project that has a 100% return, and a $1 million project that has a 11% return. Using hurdle rates only, one would pick the first, yet the second yields higher actual dollar value ($10,000 vs. $1) - kind of the same thing as 100% of a small pie or 50% of a big pie...

For a constant dollar payment, you can add up the discount factors over the time horizon and then divide your initial investment by that amount, which will give you the annual payment required to exactly equal 10%. In this example it is $175.0863

I find NPV works best when you are faced with multiple investment opportunities. For example you have 10 projects and perhaps they all present positive NPV. You can then simply line up your projects from highest NPV to lowest and pick the projects one by one up to the maximum you have to invest. A warning though as Patrick and David mentioned, you would never solely rely on NPV. Using Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is a great tool to understand and use in your analysis.

In a large organization, they should be analyzing all investment opportunities from all divisions/branches to ensure they are maximizing the return for capital expenditures. Not just what is best for each unit or division. It gets complicated however when management incentives are based on how much profit you can create for the organization. Those managers that have the art of selling can get a less desirable investment through executive over investments that can make more economical sense.

A few points. I put the data into my financial calculator and found the IRR is 16.4%. This is more than the 10% discount rate, so the quick answer is to do the project. Similarly, the positive NPV (79k) says to do the project. NPV means discount each of the four flows by the discount rate, raised to power, and subtract the initial cost. But you cannot show that it will earn 10% more the 79k, because it won't. It will earn 6.4% more than the $79k.

More importantly, even with a positive NPV, you don't "know" it is worth it to invest in it. Not for sure. The $200k future flows have considerable uncertainty in them - what if the revenues are lower, or the costs are higher, than expected? Will this project eliminate other, more profitable, investment opportunities? Will it possibly hurt existing business (take away customers, management focus, promotion, etc.)?How appropriate is the 10% discount rate? Usually the discount rate comes from weighted average cost of capital, but is that appropriate for this project, for the next four years? If the discount rate goes up, the project looks less and less attractive - at a rate > 16.4% it will have a negative NPV.