Justin Fox, Columnist

The Intangible Corporation

How do we keep corporations grounded as intangible assets become their only real source of value?

March 18, 2015 at 5:51 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

The biggest asset for most companies these days.
Photographer: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images

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What are corporations made of? Well, mostly not buildings and machines and property and such anymore. Most of their value comes from brands, patents, ideas and other intangibles.

James E. Malackowski, chief executive officer of Ocean Tomo, the intriguingly named1426696761715 merchant bank that assembled this data, predicts that the tangibles/intangibles balance will shift back a bit in the next few years as various forces (higher labor prices in China, cool new manufacturing technologies, etc.) “fuel a return to tangible domestic investments.”