Kaufpreisfaktor

Kaufpreisfaktor is the shorthand that expresses a price as a multiple. A pharmacy is said to have changed hands at so many times its earnings, or at a given share of its annual turnover. The figure is then repeated from one conversation to the next as if it were a market rate.

Buyers and sellers use it because it is quick, because it appears to make two unlike businesses comparable, and because a single number is easier to argue over than a valuation with a dozen assumptions in it.

The problem is that no reliable public multiple exists for German pharmacies, because a pharmacy transfer is a private transaction between two individuals:

• There is no exchange on which pharmacies are traded.
• Nobody is obliged to publish what a pharmacy sold for.
• No register records the prices that were actually paid.

When somebody quotes a factor with confidence, that person is describing the handful of deals they have personally seen or brokered, which may be regionally clustered, may be several years old, and are certainly not a market.

Even the benchmarking that does exist is not about prices, because Treuhand Hannover compares roughly 3.500 pharmacies in its Betriebsvergleich in 2026, and what it compares is operating performance rather than what anyone paid.

The more useful correction is one of direction, because a factor is an output of a valuation rather than an input to one. The proper sequence has three steps:

1. Work out what the earnings of the pharmacy actually are.
2. Deduct a salary for the owner's own work from those earnings.
3. Value the earnings stream on its own merits, which is what the Ertragswertverfahren does.

Divide the resulting figure by the earnings afterwards and the multiple is simply the result. Running that backwards, by picking a factor first and multiplying, produces a number with no reasoning behind it that neither side can defend when it is questioned.

Turnover based factors are worse still, because in a pharmacy most of turnover is the acquisition cost of the medicines being dispensed. Two pharmacies with the same turnover can have quite different Umsatzrendite and quite different earnings, and the one with the weaker margin is not worth the same.

Older purchase price surveys are still repeated as though they described today, and the ideeller Wert they imply may bear no relation to the practice being sold. What a factor should be depends on the pharmacy and on the adviser valuing it, and how the price is structured for tax belongs with the Steuerberater.