The system of profitability indicators, as the economy of an innovative type spreads, undergoes significant changes - very often there are cases when the value of intangible assets of an enterprise exceeds its tangible assets. This situation makes the valuation of such assets extremely necessary.
The initial value of intangible assets is the amount of money equal to the amount of payment paid or accrued for the purpose of functioning of the asset.
A property approach to the valuation of such types of property as intangible assets is usually bad in that:
1) is designed, first of all, to assess the residual value, and not its value as current;
2) it appears in cases when the system of indicators of profitability of the enterprise includes a completely artificial question of how much the reproduction of the valuation object would cost today, while preserving all the types of wear and tear accumulated by that moment.
Techniques of the cost approach are considered unpromising, since it does not reflect the dynamics of profitability indicators, and in practice they are rarely used. This approach is used as a test when evaluating an intangible asset by other methods.
The system of profitability indicators, including specific techniques that are part of the market approach group, differ mainly in what kind of information on transactions is accepted as the analytical basis.
When using the industry standards methodology, great practical experience is required in order to correctly use the data, since the process of determining the average industry royalty rates cannot be considered completely correct. Various publications on average statistical rates of periodic cash deductions (royalty rates), which are a percentage of the licensee’s income transferred to the licensor as a reward, are very common.
This method determines the probable share of the producer’s revenue using an intangible asset that the owner can claim in case of transfer of this asset.
The system of profitability indicators in this case is based on the fact that all the techniques of this method are based on the theoretical basis of statistics - a representative measurement theory. The main thing here is to choose the right criteria. The application of the ranking technique requires great care in the appointment of scales for weights and evaluation points and accuracy in choosing a reference transaction.
The main difficulty of the market principle in assessing intellectual property is that the markets for the corresponding highly individualized objects are, as a rule, very small and informationally opaque. Terms of transactions with objects and intellectual property rights are most often secret. These objects are generally generally practically illiquid and the existing system of indicators of profitability can simply “not notice” them.
The income method is based on the calculation of income expected in the future. The determination of value here is made by the methods of calculating the cost: direct capitalization; discounting cash flows; gross multiplier.
The first of these is the calculation, which is based on the estimated annual income for the valuation subject divided by the capitalization ratio. The gross multiplier method is a cost calculation that is based on information about the cost of sales, gross income and actual gross income.
An assessment of intellectual property based on this method gives very small and sometimes clearly underestimated values. It is important to keep in mind both the time factor (multidimensional income and costs) and business risks.
Among the approaches discussed above, it would be advisable to give priority to the market approach, but only if the evaluated object can really find a close analogue by which information is available on the conditions of transactions that actually took place.
The calculation of the value of intellectual property seems to be the most complex and related to the greatest number of uncertainties section of property valuation. And although economists of our time are trying to justify and derive formulas to study quantitative and qualitative economic relationships using special models of intangible assets using econometrics, it is impossible to completely solve this problem. In some countries, the assessment of intangible assets is considered as a separate calculation process. Moreover, this assessment is always tied to the assessment of business value. Here, the system of profitability indicators suggests that it is much more difficult to evaluate each object of intangible assets than to evaluate the business as a whole.
At the same time, in connection with a sharp increase in the role of industries in industrialized countries where objects and intellectual property rights are valuable, the relevant methodology and methodology of calculations are relevant. A measure of the solidity of these calculations should be served not so much by their saturation with complex formulas as by the reasonableness of the economic content.