Small traditional and internet-based entities: valuation challenges and future perspectives

As the OECD reports, smaller and medium-sized companies are the main cornerstone of most global economies. The detection of SMEs transaction values usually refers to public enterprises in order to establish which are the best strategies to adopt. This paradigm implies that generally recognised guidelines are, in some circumstances, hardly applicable to the valuation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Typically, maintaining SMEs specific peculiarities, they cannot provide proper values with their information system since the recognised methods are usually prepared for large-scale enterprises. This paper illustrates the different solutions proposed by scholars in order to reflect the SMEs typicalities in the process of business valuation with specific regard to the internet-based enterprises. The final section of this paper concludes that SME valuations of traditional and internet-based markets require adaptations and not the creation of new models.