Mark Christensen

Mark is a former Director of Synergies who is now a member of the Board of the Queensland Competition Authority. He continues as an Associate with Synergies. Mark is currently a senior lecturer in finance at QUT. He is also co-author of Australia’s leading corporate finance text and developed the methodology used by the AGSM for the estimation of betas.

Much of Mark’s experience centres on the cost of capital and valuation across regulated and unregulated sectors. He has extensive experience in advising regulated entities on the cost of capital. He has been involved in a range of valuations including forests, dams, rail networks and power stations. Some valuations have been unique where he developed a model to value crime while others have been more traditional application, for example, valuing oil rights.

Recently Mark has been providing advice to Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest corporation and one heavily involved in the natural resources industry. Mark was required to analyse and resolve valuation issues in a number of countries including Russia, Nigeria, United States of America, England, Middle East and Asia. He was required to regularly travel to these exploration sites.

Mark was involved with a colleague in developing the AGSM beta files.  The work required calculations for the market proxy and firm return calculations considering capitalisation adjustments, dilution factors and infrequency of trading adjustments.