Tuesday, February 9, 2016

As data comes into Calcbench, we continue to see new things in the information. Today’s topic is Goodwill Impairment charges. Last week, for example, we saw Yahoo! take an impairment of over 4 Billion dollars in their end of year earnings report!

By connecting this idea with other trends that we see in the economy, like the continuing stockpiling of cash, one may wonder what they will do with it (see our blog for more on the topic). Some firms buyback stock , some pay dividends while other buy other firms and technologies and pay premiums for it.

When firms buy other firms, what ends up happening? How significant can it be when these transactions don’t work?

So we asked a simple question: ‘Could our platform tell us how many firms took Goodwill Impairment Charges of $250 Million or more every for any of the last 5 quarters?’

The data is in the table below:

Firms with Goodwill Impairment Losses GT 250 M USD
3Q 2014 15
4Q 2014 16
1Q 2015 8
2Q 2015 8
3Q 2015 32

If Yahoo! is a leading indicator you can expect that there will be more than 32 firms at the end of Q4 2015 and many more in 2016 with impairment charges coming. Ouch!

For more information on this or any other topic related to corporate financial disclosures please contact us@calcbench.com.


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