Curious how this would change if R&D was capitalized. Of course it would just make ebitda a less accurate proxy for cash flow but we’d still be looking at it very differently.
assuming that the R&D expenses largely convert into some kind of assets.
edit: is anyone able to comment how the accounting for this kind of thing usually works?
e.g. if a company spent $1m on R&D, can it arbitrarily add a line item on its balance sheet for around $1m of research outputs as some flavour of intangible asset? (this is obviously not a very accurate way to account for things in cases where the R&D failed to produce anything of utility, or produced much less utility that the R&D cost) or are the assets produced by R&D (if any) meant to be fairly valued in isolation from the cost to produce them?
This is called capitalizing. Companies are not allowed to do it with R&D under GAAP. But it gets tricky when one company can build a factory, call it capex, and spread the expense over 10 years. Whereas another builds software infra and must expense 100% immediately.