Kaufpreisfaktor

Kaufpreisfaktor is the shorthand that expresses a price as a multiple. A pharmacy is said to have changed hands at so many times its earnings, or at a given share of its annual turnover, and the multiple travels from conversation to conversation as if it were a market rate. Buyers and sellers reach for it because it is quick, because it appears to make two unlike businesses comparable, and because a single number is easier to argue over than a valuation with a dozen assumptions in it.

The problem is that no reliable public multiple exists for German pharmacies. Pharmacy transfers are private transactions between individuals. There is no exchange, no obligation to publish, and no register of prices actually paid. When somebody quotes a factor with confidence, that person is describing the handful of deals they have personally seen or brokered, which may be regionally clustered, may be several years old, and are certainly not a market. Even the benchmarking that does exist is not about prices. Treuhand Hannover compares roughly 3.500 pharmacies in its Betriebsvergleich in 2026, and what it compares is operating performance rather than what anyone paid.

The more useful correction is one of direction. A factor is an output of a valuation, not an input to one. The proper sequence is to work out what the earnings actually are, to deduct a salary for the owner's own work, and to value the earnings stream on its own merits, which is what the Ertragswertverfahren does. Divide the resulting figure by the earnings afterwards and a multiple falls out. Running that backwards, by picking a factor first and multiplying, produces a number with no reasoning behind it that neither side can defend when it is questioned.

Turnover based factors are worse still, because in a pharmacy most of turnover is the acquisition cost of the medicines being dispensed. Two pharmacies with the same turnover can have quite different Umsatzrendite and quite different earnings, and the one with the weaker margin is not worth the same. Older purchase price surveys are still repeated as though they described today, and the ideeller Wert they imply may bear no relation to the practice being sold. What a factor should be depends on the pharmacy and on the adviser valuing it, and how the price is structured for tax belongs with the Steuerberater.