The effects of intellectual capital on financial performance: A case study of petrochemical and pharmaceutical firms

Abstract

There is no doubt that traditional accounting does not provide actual value of assets since they only measure tangible assets. Intellectual capital provides a new concept for measuring actual value of the assets and we can calculate future values of the firm. In this paper, we first calculate intellectual capital based on the ratio of market value/book value for three years period. Then we investigate the relationship between intellectual capital and growth rate of intellectual capital as well as financial performance of some publicly traded petrochemical and pharmaceutical firms. The results of our survey indicate that there is a positive relationship between intellectual capital and equity growth with EVA and return of assets. However, there is no meaningful relationship between intellectual assets with net earnings.

Keywords

• Intellectual capital
• Financial return
• EVA
• Return of assets
• Earning per share