Intangible Asset Market Value Study
Within the last quarter century, intellectual capital has emerged as the leading asset class. The term “intellectual capital” refers generally to traditional Intellectual Property assets – patents, trademarks and copyrights. At Ocean Tomo, we uniquely include within the definition of “intellectual capital” special client intangible assets, especially corporate and government preference rights.
In the 2025 release, the Study now reflects a panel of 50 years of data in the U.S. market and 20 years of data in foreign markets. The growth in the value of Intellectual Capital Equity® can be seen when evaluating the market capitalization of the S&P 500 as shown in the chart below.
The composition of corporate value has undergone a fundamental transformation over the past five decades. In 1975, tangible assets—property, plant, equipment, inventory, and other physical capital—represented 83% of the market value of companies comprising the S&P 500 index, with intangible assets accounting for only 17%.
By the end of 2025, this relationship had completely inverted: intangible assets now constitute approximately 92% of S&P 500 market capitalization, while tangible assets have been reduced to a mere 8%. This 75 percentage point shift represents what Ocean Tomo has defined as “economic inversion”— a wholesale transformation in the nature of value creation whereby economic worth has migrated from what can be “touched” to what can be “thought.”
The magnitude and implications of this transformation are comparable to the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Just as the Industrial Revolution fundamentally restructured economic activity from agrarian and craft-based production to mechanized manufacturing, the intangible revolution has redefined the sources and measurement of corporate value in the 21st century. However, while the Industrial Revolution required a century to unfold fully, the intangible revolution has occurred within a single human lifespan, with particularly rapid acceleration occurring in the 1985-2005 period when intangible asset market value (IAMV) increased from 32% to 79%—a remarkable 47 percentage point surge in just two decades.
In 2005, we expanded our IAMV study beyond the S&P 500 to explore the components of value in several key international markets. Stock market indexes from Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea were selected and analyzed to determine the comparable role of intangible assets.
Intangible assets are now responsible for 90% of all business value. Download the Ocean Tomo Study of Intangible Asset Market Value.
