U.S. consumers love gift cards. According to research firm CEB Tower Group, Americans loaded approximately $124 billion onto gift cards in 2014 alone. However, it is easy to see why, in the ABL world, the estate tends to regard gift cards as nothing to celebrate. After all, from the unsecured creditors’ perspective, accepting gift cards during the course of a liquidation sale is tantamount to […]
Baseball players often wax poetic about the “sweet spot”: that point where the bat’s barrel meets the ball and the result is a perfectly struck shot rising gloriously away from the batter’s box. You don’t need to watch it. Flip the bat to the batboy and start your trot; you know the ball’s gone. Liquidators also speak of the sweet spot—that point in a disposition […]
In the past, appraisers used basic principles such as comparative sales and market trends to place values on a collective of assets. Then, liquidators entered the picture, and the Net Orderly Liquidation Value (NOLV) model moved things in a far more sophisticated direction, with the actual costs associated with selling through those assets becoming the great variable. Achieving the highest NOLV means creating financial models […]
When Ron Johnson took the helm at J.C. Penney, he told The Wall Street Journal about his high hopes for the chain. “The department store is king of the hill in most countries I go to,” he said. “That’s what we want to achieve at J.C. Penney.” Unfortunately, the maestro behind Apple’s amazingly profitable stores was less successful, to put it mildly, in his 17 […]
For just about anybody in the business world, the term “metals” immediately calls to mind the fast-paced trading action of places like the London Metals Exchange, where fortunes rise and fall each day based on the flux in demand for aluminum, zinc, nickel, tin and a host of other metals. As a former metals analyst, I can attest to the fact that a veritable army […]
When creditors hired Tiger Group to liquidate the assets of Sherwood Brands, a U.S. candy manufacturer and distributor, the sale followed what might be thought of as today’s “new rules for maximizing asset recovery.” These new rules reflect the expanded role we believe we must play to be competitive in today’s fastpaced and more complex business culture. At some point, one could argue, we opened […]
This past June, the equipment and inventory formerly owned by bankrupt Quantum Foods in three Bolingbrook, Ill., buildings fetched in excess of $13 million in a turnkey, going-concern sale to West Liberty Foods, LLC. The transaction, coordinated by Tiger Group, City Capital Advisors, LLC and Schneider Industries, was just the latest to illustrate how the creative approaches of today’s disposition firms—often working in strategic partnerships […]
Thanks to the astonishing growth in the power and complexity of data-gathering technologies, the role of analytics is looming larger than ever at businesses of all types and sizes. Indeed, c-suites everywhere buzz with talk of “big data” and its potentially transformative role. And when it comes to asset-based appraisals in the wholesale, retail and manufacturing sectors, it is certainly true that analytical reporting — […]
Explosions and firefights are part and parcel of today’s videogames, but a different sort of “creative destruction” is at play within the industry itself. After decades in which video games were available mostly on physical media like discs and cartridges, the arrival of trends such as mobile gaming, digital downloading and cloud computing promises to change the way people buy and play video games in […]
Ineligible inventory – a category of assets that banks avoid lending against – can represent a double-edged sword for asset-based lenders. On the one hand, lenders know that when they don’t lend against such items as raw materials, samples, in-transit goods, or slow-moving inventory, they can often leave themselves a cushion to recoup value and mitigate risk. On the other and, experienced lenders are not […]
