Ideeller Wert

Ideeller Wert is the part of a pharmacy's price that no physical item accounts for, because the fittings, the shelving, the laboratory equipment and the stock can all be listed and valued item by item. What remains once that list is complete is the ideeller Wert:

• The location of the pharmacy is part of it.
• The established customer relationships belong to it as well.
• The trained team is part of what a buyer pays for.
• The supplier arrangements are included in the same figure.
• The business is running and earning on the day it changes hands.

It usually dominates the price for a structural reason, because a pharmacy is not a capital intensive business. Its physical assets are modest against its turnover, and much of the stock is financed rather than owned outright.

A buyer is therefore paying mainly for a position that already produces a Betriebsergebnis, which is why the Ertragswertverfahren starts from earnings instead of from an asset list. The asset value sets a minimum for the price, and it is not the price itself.

This is also the hardest part of a price to defend in a negotiation, so a seller should expect a buyer to challenge it. The whole figure depends on one assumption, namely that the earnings continue after the person who produced them has left. Where much of the goodwill actually belongs to the departing owner, in personal relationships with prescribers and with long standing customers, the buyer is being asked to pay for something that may leave with the seller.

A buyer will therefore look for evidence that the earnings belong to the location and to the team rather than to one person, and a seller who can produce that evidence is in a much stronger position. Three concrete things support that case:

• A stable Kundenfrequenz over several years is the first.
• Prescriptions coming from several different practices are the second.
• Staff who are staying with the pharmacy are the third.

Sellers should also be careful with the figures that circulate, because surveys of pharmacy purchase prices are quoted years after the data was collected, as though the market had not changed since. The same is true of any Kaufpreisfaktor offered as a shortcut, so what the ideeller Wert of a particular pharmacy is worth depends on that pharmacy and on the adviser who values it.

How the price is split between assets and ideeller Wert in the contract has consequences for both sides. Those consequences depend on the legal form and on the individual situation, so the split belongs with the Steuerberater before anything is signed.