Companies in liquidation. A model for the assessment of the value of used machinery

The current economic crisis is creating serious global effects on the real economy, especially in terms of solvency and economic stability of many companies, forced to interrupt their activities and to initiate bankruptcy proceedings. In this case, the assessment of the value of the industrial machinery that can be reused is a problem that often arises. In the literature different approaches to estimate plant and industrial machinery are illustrated. Each method includes several specification and, in practice, only in exceptional cases, there are consistent data for comparison. The major problem consists in the identification and the valuation of the level of depreciation which intervenes in the definition of the value of used industrial machinery. In the present work an algorithm to determine in a rational manner the depreciation of used industrial machinery has developed. The procedure has its theoretical basis in the analysis of formal deductions of the value of new machinery. The model defined in this research considers the factors that contribute to decrease the original value of the machinery. Empirical formulas have been developed to estimate the market value of used industrial machinery on the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis of depreciation functions. The interpretation and schematization of the results have led to the definition of value-time curves for the three main depreciation factors (age, income decay, obsolescence). The result is a flexible model for the evaluation of different types of machinery and a simply procedure, with a reduced number of variables to be taken into consideration.