How Are Intellectual Capital Components Associated with Financial Performance? Evidence from European IT Market Leaders

Intellectual capital comprises human, structural, and customer capital. Traditional assessment methods, such as the Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient, rely on financial reporting and do not provide a direct indicator of customer capital. This study proposes domain type (global or local) as a publicly available proxy for customer capital and examines its association with the financial performance (ROA, profit margin) of 2558 leading European IT companies by sales volume in 2023. The models include management intensity and intangible asset intensity as proxies for human and structural capital and control for listing status, company size, country and industry. Ordinary least squares models with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors were estimated, adding controls in blocks. A global domain was weakly negatively associated with ROA, and this association was sensitive to the inclusion of size and country controls, with no association with profit margin. Management intensity was weakly positively associated with profit margin but not with ROA. Intangible asset intensity showed a stable negative association with both indicators across all specifications and robustness checks. The results indicate that intangible asset intensity is the most stable factor, while the suitability of domain type as a proxy for customer capital requires further verification using panel data.