Proceedings

The value of an economic entity may differ from its price in response to the pressure
applied by: the objectives followed in the transaction (continuity of activity,
dissolution, strategy modifications), the existence of a company brand, the raise of the
market quota, the consolidation of the business with new activity segments, the value
of the human capital, social or emotional reasons, etc. All these factors reflect a
shadow of relativity upon the notion of value, which they eventually reduce to an
estimation unconditionally subject to change. The volatitity of the concept can be
related both to the time perspective, as the value amount established is practicalyy
valid only at the moment of the evaluation, and to the spatial, geographical, political
instability, social, or natural factors perspective, the last one having a significant
weight in the quantification process.
This gives birth to a series of questions that have not yet found an answer: Is the value
of the company composed of the value of its net assets (the sum of the composing
parts), or is it determind by the company’s ability to generate future benefits for the
interest owners? What is the value of a company that, although it has a balanced
asset structure and has generated substantial benefits for the shareholders in the past,
activates on a collapsed market? Does it really have no monetary equivalent? Here
we refer to the famous “one-dollar takeovers”. If the answers to these questions are
searched for in a period of economic-financial crisis, the difficulty of finding them
raises with the multiplication of the factors that exert pressures on the economic
entities (lack of outlets, lack of financial resources, social pressures, legal
inconsistencies, etc.).
The need to establish the value of companies reveals its importance in various
moments of their development, marking thus their destinies. The provision of a value
level is required in cases of property transfers to other shareholders, since it is known
that the interests of the parties involved in the trasaction are divergent. The quotation
of the companies on the capital market is another moment that requires a value
support of the company’s dimension, since the investors are interested in a correctly
estimated share price, which would give them the possibility to obtain future earnings.
Within restructuring operations, establishing the company’s value is the basic element
that conditions the success of the performed action, a process aimed to capitalize on
the competitive advantages that can be offered by a different form of organization. As
Thauvron (2007) notices, evaluation is a company management instrument that
managers use to guide the operations performed in order to meet the fundamental
objective of maximizing the entity’s value. Under these circumstances, the doctrine of
the economic-financial analysis is called upon to offer solutions for supporting the
investment process to the purpose of performing it in an objective manner, providing
useful benchmarks for the health of the economic environment in general.
The diversity of the solutions used to establish the value of the companies is included
into major approaches based on: the present value of the cash flows, the evaluation of
the equity, or comparisons between market values. Each of these approaches is
supported by significant data generated by the presence of the company in the
economic environment and attempts to provide pertinent value solutions.
These evaluation methods are mainly supported by the influence of quantitative
factors. Only the extent to which these determiners also include the effects of
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