Intangible assets listed on a corporate balance sheet are things that add value to a company but that don’t actually exist in physical form. Intangible assets primarily include the legal rights to some idea, image, or form. Any assets that a company hasn’t otherwise listed in the assets portion of the balance sheet go into an all-inclusive portion called other assets.
The exact items included in the other assets category can vary quite a bit depending on the industry in which the company operates.
Here are just a few examples on intangible assets:
The big yellow M that McDonald’s uses as its logo is worth quite a bit because people recognize it worldwide. Imagine if McDonald’s simply gave that M, which it calls the “Golden Arches,” away to another restaurant. How much business would it attract?
The curved style of the Coca-Cola bottles, as well as the font of the words Coca-Cola, are worth a lot of money because, like the Golden Arches, they’re easy to recognize across the globe.
For pharmaceutical companies, owning the patent to some new form of medication can be worth quite a lot even if they’re not producing the medicine yet simply because the patent gives them the right to produce that medicine while simultaneously restricting other businesses from producing the same thing.
None of these examples can be physically touched, but they contribute to the value of the company and are certainly considered long-term assets.