Page 37 - Ekonomija i Biznis_noemvri 2015.indd

РУБРИКА
(photo: “L+C Knowledge LLC”) formed collection of budget revenues.
Have you ever wondered,
what is the structure
of Facebook’s balance
sheet? Amazing 54.5% of
the accounting assets of
the company in 2014 are
invisible: goodwill or good
reputation, purchased
patents (for example,
from IBM, Microsoft
and AOL), licenses,
acquired technology (for
example, from Instagram),
trademarks
According to the personal confes-
sions of several Macedonian business-
men, the fear of increased tax liabili-
ties sometimes acts as a dam that stops
even brilliant ideas and initiatives. It rights. And what would be the benefit
is exactly for such, to many people, in- from all this?
explicable and insufficiently convinc-
ing reasons, that businessmen neglect
and underestimate the potential of
intangible assets. This is a seemingly
nonsensical accounting problem, but
as I will try to explain furthermore,
this is also a macroeconomic problem.
The insufficient awareness of com-
panies about the importance and the
value of intellectual capital that they
possess is one of the reasons for the
accelerated development of the pri-
vate sector in transition economies.
Ignoring the main contributions of
the intellectual property rights re-
sults in significant underestimation
of the value of intangible assets and
goodwill in financial statements, in
insufficient and temporary efforts to
increase the intellectual capital and
ultimately, in limited development of
private business.
THE BENEFITS FROM
INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL
The assessment of intangible as-
sets and intellectual capital can be an
extremely difficult task, but on the
other hand, it brings many benefits
for the company. Maybe the company
has research and development costs
which should be classified as internal-
ly generated intangible assets? Maybe
it possesses purchased patents, trade-
marks, licenses, concessions, soft-
ware applications, industrial designs,
technical specifications? Many intel-
lectual property rights are either not
presented or they are unrealistically
Aleksandar Stojkov
The author is an associate
professor at the Faculty of Law
“Iustinianus Primus” in Skopje
presented in the accounting books of
Macedonian companies. Why is this so
when accountants are well aware that
the international accounting stan-
dard 38 provides great freedom in the
valuation of the intellectual property
Have you ever wondered, what is
the structure of Facebook’s balance
sheet? Amazing 54.5% of the account-
ing assets of the company in 2014 are
invisible: goodwill or good reputation,
purchased patents (for example, from
IBM, Microsoft and AOL), licenses, ac-
quired technology (for example, from
Instagram), trademarks… Before the
initial public offering of shares with
a value of 16 billion USD on May 18,
2012, the company in the prospectus
to the US Securities and Exchange
Commission explained that: “if we are
not able to protect our intellectual
property, then the value of our brand
and the other intangible assets may be
reduced, and our business may suffer
damages”. The experts in methods of
valuation of intellectual capital also
know that the company owns an enor-
mous amount of intangible assets un-
identified by accounting. Hence, if an
economic assessment is made (which
is more comprehensive than the ac-
counting assessment), then the intan-
gible assets of Facebook cover approx-
imately 90% of the market value of the
company. This is an excellent example
of a successful strategy for managing
intellectual property rights, which
maximizes the shareholders’ wealth.
What are the other benefits for the
companies that have a more realistic
valuation of their intangible assets?
First, the company by definition
gets higher accounting capitalization,
and in normal market conditions, also
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