A corporate balance sheet, prepared according to generally accepted accounting principles, does a reasonable job informing about the physical assets and financial capital employed by a company. But when it comes to the increasingly important intangible assets of corporate enterprises, it provides next to no insight.

Under GAAP, expenditures made to increase brand awareness, to foster innovation, or to improve the productivity of employees cannot be capitalized. Instead, the logic goes, they must be expensed through the income statement, because the future benefits of such investments are so uncertain. The problem with that, says Baruch Lev, an accounting and finance professor at New York University, is that corporate investment in tangible assets has stagnated. "It's the investments in R&D, Internet applications, human resources, and customer acquisition that drive the performance of companies now. And there is no indication of the value of those investments in financial reports," he says.

The aim of CFO's third annual Knowledge Capital Scorecard, developed by Lev with the help of Marc Bothwell, a vice president and portfolio manager at Credit Suisse Asset Management, is to quantify those intangible values. On a more itemized basis, knowledge capital is intellectual and human capital, customer and supplier capital. It is the sum of all the intangible factors and qualities that enable a company to earn a better-than-average return on its GAAP-valued asset base. Thus, a company with a strong brand name gets better prices than its competitors. Those with effective R&D programs are better able to defend their markets and create new ones. And those with superior employee training garner a variety of productivity benefits.

This year's Scorecard, which ran the numbers for the leading companies ranked by knowledge capital in 22 nonfinancial industries, confirms the importance of such intangible assets. As was the case last year, companies with high levels of investment in R&D and advertising continued to show higher levels of knowledge earnings and far better stock performance than companies with lower levels of spending in those areas. Intel topped the list in 1999, with knowledge earnings of $9.5 billion. The semiconductor giant also came in with the highest level of knowledge capital--the present discounted value of all future knowledge earnings--at $209 billion, surpassing last year's leader, Microsoft, which saw its knowledge capital drop 10 percent, to $189 billion. Pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer posted the largest increase in knowledge earnings ($3 billion) for the year, due in large part to its acquisition of Warner-Lambert.

As the Scorecard shows, however, knowledge earnings and capital are relevant to more than just New Economy and pharmaceutical companies. Consider Ford Motor and General Motors. The book value of Ford as of its September 30, 2000, 10Q filing was $18.3 billion, compared with $31.5 billion for GM. Ford posted knowledge earnings of $6.7 billion, more than 50 percent higher than GM's $4.3 billion. This comparison suggests that Ford is doing a much better job managing the intangible drivers of value in the motor vehicles business. "Knowledge capital is not just a New Economy metric," says Lev. "It indicates a company's profitability, both historical and anticipated, above an expected rate of return on physical and financial assets."

This year's results also indicate the value of incorporating knowledge capital into investment analysis. For example, the Scorecard shows that the market valuations of such New Economy stars as Dell Computer, Microsoft, and Intel, as well as knowledge-intensive companies in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, have very little to do with the assets reflected on their balance sheets. Their stocks trade at huge multiples of book value (examples: Dell, 17.5; Pfizer, 18.2). But when knowledge capital is added to book value (a sum deemed comprehensive value by Lev), the ratio of market value to that comprehensive value becomes far more reasonable: Dell, 1.26; Pfizer, 1.90.

Companies with a ratio of market value to comprehensive value significantly above 1 can be viewed as overvalued. Those with a ratio below 1 are probably undervalued. The negative correlation between this ratio and the subsequent stock returns of the 105 companies evaluated in the Scorecard was remarkably strong. Between the August 31, 2000, cutoff date for the Scorecard analysis and the end of last year, the average weighted return of 53 companies with a ratio of market value to comprehensive value below the median of 1.08 was 7 percent. For the 52 companies with a ratio above the median, the average return was -15.5 percent.

Companies with some of the highest ratios, such as Broadcom (8.5) and Siebel Systems (5.8), have since experienced some of the most severe slides in the stock market. Broadcom is down 80 percent since last August, and Siebel is down 60 percent. In contrast, companies trading at low multiples of comprehensive value fared far better. The shares of Rockwell International, for example, with a ratio of 0.62, and Georgia Pacific (0.35) were both up 15 percent over the same period.

"We compared it with other metrics, and this was a particularly strong result," says Bothwell. "If a stock looked overvalued according to our metric, the market realigned it." Giving further credence to the argument that intangible assets and knowledge capital are the real drivers of value in corporate enterprises. --A.O.

BUILDING A BETTER SCORECARD

WHAT ARE KNOWLEDGE EARNINGS and knowledge capital? New York University accounting and finance professor Baruch Lev's methodology for computing these values begins with an estimate of a company's "normalized earnings." That figure is derived from the average of three years of historical core earnings, and three years of consensus analyst estimates as compiled by IBES International. Thus, knowledge earnings reflect both past performance and future growth potential.

These normalized earnings are then compared with the expected rates of return on the company's physical and financial assets as recorded on its balance sheet. In the competitive global marketplace, physical and financial assets have largely become commodities. The expected aftertax returns used in the broad cross-sectional Scorecard are 7 percent for physical assets and 4.5 percent for financial assets. In company- specific measurements, physical and financial assets are adjusted to fair values, and their expected returns are adjusted to company circumstances.

The portion of normalized earnings for any given year that exceeds the expected returns on book assets represents knowledge earnings--the performance contribution attributable to the intangible assets of a company. Knowledge capital is then computed as the present discounted value of all future knowledge earnings. Without a widely accepted expected rate of return for knowledge assets, the average 10.5 percent historical aftertax return of three knowledge-rich industries (software, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals) is used as the discount rate. -- A.O.

ACROSS THE BOARDS

From aerospace & defense to telecom equipment, industry rankings of median knowledge-capital earnings.

THE SCOPE OF KNOWLEDGE

How knowledge capital compares at the top companies.