Finansiell värdering av patent
The purpose of this master thesis is to map and analyze the appropriate valuation approaches used for Intellectual Property rights and develope a model for valuing patents. This project has been executed on behalf of Electrolux?s Group Intellectual Property and is intended to be used for managerial purposes.Project limitations include patents that doesent concern technology oriented products and services, real option methods, financial forecasts, decisions concerning patents taken by the R&D division, patent applications in general and taking into account unexpected future management decisions regarding patents.Electrolux?s Intellextual Property team applies, manages and protects the groups Intellectual Property rights including patents, designs and trademarks. With an increased globalization and the rise of emerging markets, incentives have increased further to protect and safeguard the group?s innovations.Mainly there are three different valuations approaches for valuing intellectual property rights, these include the income based approach, cost base approach and market based approach. The income based approach determines the net present value of future economic income. The cost based approach computes the value through estimating those costs that would have been spent in developing a similar patent with same level of customer utility under the same cost structure condition. The marked based approach aims at comparing transactions comprising similar intellectual property rights and principally using the same pricing variables from those transactions. With regard to the evaluation factors market aggregation, usability and repeatability; our conclusion is that the income based approach is the most effective and plausible method to use in a valuation model.The valuation model was developed to value two different patent types; feature driven and cost driven patents. Feature driven patents generates value through increased revenues, cost driven patents generates value through enabling the company to produce output at lower costs. To be able to use the income based approach, the patents impact on profitability needs to be estimated. This was done by analyzing how the patent and its underlying products relate to factors suchs as customer utility, company strategy, marketdemand and market outlook, technology, quality of the patent application, legal risk and global and regional legistlation.Finally the valuation model provides a sensitivity analysis which distributes monetary patent values based on variations in the main value affecting factors, giving the value a stronger connection to the financial forecasts. The discount rates and patents impact on profitability are the strongest value affecting factors in this valuation model and are therefore the main variables in the sensitivity analysis.Conclusively the implicit analysis measuring the patent impact on profitability became the key component for achieving the goal to develop a model that compares the value of two patents. The sensitivity analysis releases the uncertainty derived from the implicit analysis part of the model, making the valuation results more connected to the financial forecasts. With the valuation model as a decision support, Electrolux Intellectual Property team can asses which patent that are most likely to be most valuable and it also increases the team?s insight on which value intervals the intellectual property team protects.