Commercial values in a business can include the intellectual properties such as patents, trademarks, and designs and also copyrights owned by that business. In many instances, a business has little or no commercial value without its intellectual properties. The resources of the business, client and supplier lists, and profits should thus not only be the only factors taken into consideration when a person wants to calculate the commercial values of a business.
Putting a total on commercial values may be a bit more difficult. One for instance, cannot stop at the cost of patent or trademark registration, but must also consider the commercial value in terms of usefulness and marketability of for instance, a specific invention. License agreements and the income generated from such must be considered. From the above information it can be seen that commercial values can be rather tricky especially if you want to get to a final figure because you want to insure or sell your business. The other end is also true. If you have to decide whether the seller’s price for a business is indeed worth it then you will have to consider commercial values such as domain names, business names registered and intellectual property such as trademarks as well.
The best advice is to get in expert guidance from experienced intellectual property attorneys to help you assess fair commercial values of the various intellectual properties owned by the business before getting to a selling price or purchasing offer total. For one, commercial value in terms of trademark rights is often exploited through franchising. When you thus want to sell a franchise the commercial values will be all the more important. Smit & Van Wyk has an experienced team of intellectual property attorneys to assist with the setting up of license agreements, assignments, and registration of intellectual property rights, franchising and assessment of commercial values for the various intellectual properties.