Why are you putting caveats in your question? Do you have insight into Rocawear’s financial statements at the time?
If so then rather share that info than your broad ramblings
So what you're saying is that you can't find one company that sold for less than half of what it grossed in one year? Why am I not surprised?
I already posted an article from the NYT stating that Rocawear had 700 million in gross sales and Iconix projected royalties of $43M (by the way which was something I mentioned in my first post in this thread that nobody else did when discussing valuing an apparel company). Based on the royalties $200Ms is fair, but you can sell the royalties without selling the whole business. Again, if a company is grossing $700M it's a billion dollar company. It's hard to find somewhere to park a billion dollars, so you usually find something that has enough cash flow and you take it from there. That's why you see a lot of big buildings and hotels go for billions of dollars, because people and hedge funds need to park the money somewhere, and even more so if it's a foreigner with dirty money. So if it was REALLY grossing that much Jay Z sold it for cheap, and then to further write it down is crazy. You bought the company for 5x royalties, what is there to write down? Also note in the article the company was sold with a line of credit from the now bankrupt and non existent Lehman Brothers. We're talking about hella retirement funds that lost money with Lehman Brothers.
The only way all of this makes sense is that values were inflated from the very inception, Lehman got conned, money got washed, now the income is so low there isn't enough revenue to hide dirty money so they write it down.
It was fun while it lasted
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