RE: How SYME operates.....19 Feb 2021 12:13
DG73 your example appears good but you have not worked it through.
Let me explain, You are a wine company, you have £1m of Inventory ( WIP ) brewing in the vats.
You see a parcel of adjacent land for £500Km which you want to buy, so you monetise half the inventory and buy the land
Since monetising the Inventory was a true sale, your assets (WIP) goes down by £500K + cost of sale, but your Land Assets go up by the value of Land (less cost of buying).
Sometime in the future (end of of fermentation arrives) its time to bottle and sell. However you only have £500K of wine to bottle, the other £500K belongs to someone else, (and you are paying the storage and warehouse cost: but that's an aside). But it is no problem, you just buy it back ( because that is the Syme business model) Hand over £500K, inventory is returned, and everything is rosy. But where does te £500K come from? Sell the land you just bought, mortgage the land, or get a loan from the bank - (Interesting the company potential is only half of what it was before as they only have £500K of WIP). The idea is great, I think it will have limited applicability. The way this is accounted for and accounting treatments is what needs to be worked through (which as far as I understand has always been a difficult area).
It is great for some Inventory, but you cannot say a company with £100M WIP on the balance sheet could monetise that. It will only be a very small fraction, maybe 1 - 5% if they are on top of Inventory Management.