MARKETS / GLOSSARY / TOTAL ASSETS

Total assets

Total assets is everything the company controls at the reporting date, at the value the accounts carry it at — cash, inventory, buildings, machines, acquired brands, money owed to it.

Definition

How it is computed here

Formulaas reported on the balance sheet (= total liabilities + shareholders' equity)
UnitCurrency amount
PeriodOne fiscal year, as reported
SourceExtracted from SEC filings; every value on an asset page carries the accounting tag and the filing it came from
Identifierativo_total
The inputs

What goes into the formula

Current assetsWhat the company expects to turn into cash within a year: cash itself, customers who have not paid yet, inventory.
Non-current assetsEverything expected to last longer: property, plant and equipment, and intangibles such as goodwill recorded when the company bought another one.

A formula without its inputs explained is decoration. Where an input is missing from a filing, the metric is left empty here rather than completed with a zero or an estimate.

Worked example

How to calculate total assets, step by step

The balance sheet identity, which has to hold on every page of this site.

Total assets$6,000M
Total liabilities$4,000M
Shareholders' equity$2,000M
  1. Assets = liabilities + equity: 4,000 + 2,000 = $6,000M.
  2. The identity holds — and this site checks it on every company, publishing the result as a named verification.
  3. Equity funds 2,000 ÷ 6,000 = 33% of the asset base; lenders and suppliers fund the other 67%.

Result: $6,000M of assets, one third funded by the owners

Total assets is the left side of the balance sheet. Everything else on this page is an argument about who owns it.

The figures in this example are illustrative and rounded — they are not a real company. The real figures on this site are the live ones below and on every asset page, each carrying the filing it came from.

Why it matters

What total assets is good for

It is the denominator of return on assets and the scale measure that works for companies where revenue does not — a bank's revenue says little about its size, its assets say a great deal. It is also one half of an arithmetic check this site runs on every filing.

The limit

What this number does not tell you

Assets are carried at accounting values, which can be decades old. Land bought in 1960 sits at its 1960 price; a brand built over fifty years does not appear at all, while a brand BOUGHT last year appears in full as goodwill. Two companies with identical operations therefore show very different total assets depending on whether they grew by buying or by building — and the bigger number is not the better business.

Every metric on this site is published with its blind spot stated. A figure without its limit is half a fact.

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In the data

Highest reported total assets

From the most recent fiscal year of each company. Only companies reporting in US dollars are ranked here — a figure in yen or won is not larger, it is in another currency.

On a real company

See it in a published filing

Their sectors

These pages show the figure across up to nineteen fiscal years, with the accounting tag and the filing behind every value.

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