SPEEDVALUE: Liacom Already Cracked, and What That Says About the Goodwill Layer
Liacom ended 2025 with NIS 2.06 million of pre-tax profit, yet SPEEDVALUE still booked a NIS 1.64 million goodwill impairment and cut the remaining contingent-consideration liability to just NIS 0.192 million. This follow-up shows why that is not only a Liacom footnote, but an early signal about the group’s whole goodwill layer.
Where The Main Article Stopped, And What This Follow-up Is Isolating
The main article argued that SPEEDVALUE's growth was real, but that its cash quality and forward visibility had not yet caught up. This follow-up isolates a different layer, more accounting-driven but no less economic: what the Liacom acquisition is already saying about the quality of the group’s goodwill stack.
Liacom, acquired in December 2024 for NIS 21 million plus contingent consideration, does not look like an operating failure. It ended 2025 with NIS 2.059 million of pre-tax profit and NIS 1.570 million of after-tax profit. Yet in the same year SPEEDVALUE recorded a NIS 1.642 million goodwill impairment on Liacom and, at the same time, booked a NIS 1.503 million gain from remeasuring the contingent consideration after updating Liacom’s 2025 and 2026 revenue forecasts. That is not a collapse of the deal. It is already a first haircut to the purchase-price story.
This matters because Liacom is not a side bucket. Its year-end 2025 goodwill balance stood at NIS 11.530 million, about 36.6% of the group’s total goodwill. Total net goodwill stood at NIS 31.543 million, out of NIS 47.029 million of combined net goodwill and other intangible assets. In other words, goodwill alone already accounts for roughly two thirds of the intangible layer. Once the largest goodwill unit has already cracked, this is no longer just a Liacom question. It becomes a question about how the whole acquisition layer should now be read.
The Subsidiary Still Earns, But The Purchase Price Is Already Being Cut Back
The key tension in Liacom is the gap between operating contribution and acquisition accounting. At the subsidiary level, 2025 was not a lost year. Liacom generated more than NIS 2 million of pre-tax profit and was one of the few subsidiaries that made a meaningful profit alongside Code Value and Wall Dan. At the group level, however, the value attached to that same asset no longer holds at the level implied near closing.
| Item | 2025 figure | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Liacom pre-tax profit | NIS 2.059m | Shows the business itself did not turn loss-making |
| Liacom after-tax profit | NIS 1.570m | The bottom-line contribution still exists |
| Goodwill impairment | NIS 1.642m | The acquisition layer was already cut in the first full year |
| Year-end goodwill balance | NIS 11.530m | Liacom remains the largest goodwill unit in the group |
| Impairment as a share of pre-tax profit | About 79.8% | Most of the year’s operating contribution is almost offset at the valuation layer |
That is the key point: Liacom does not prove the acquisition failed, but it does prove the deal no longer looks the way it did at signing. If the company had to cut NIS 1.642 million of goodwill already in 2025, the implication is that the economic value attached to the deal eroded faster than the operating result produced by the subsidiary itself.
The accounting nuance matters. After the write-down, the company still states that Liacom’s recoverable amount exceeded its carrying value. So it is not saying the unit failed its impairment test outright. It is saying something more precise: a write-down was required, but after that cut the model still supports the remaining balance. This is not a full write-off, but it is clearly an admission that the original story was too high.
The Contingent Consideration Already Rewrote The Forecast
The sharper signal sits in the contingent consideration liability. The deal with Liacom’s sellers set an additional payment of NIS 2 million if operating profit reached more than NIS 4 million and up to NIS 5 million, and NIS 3 million if it exceeded NIS 5 million, for each of 2024 and 2025. On top of that, a possible NIS 3 million payment was set for 2026 if operating profit exceeds NIS 5 million.
In practice, during 2025 the company paid NIS 3 million to the sellers for 2024. But the 2025 threshold was not met, and the balance sheet shows what happened next: the contingent-consideration liability fell from NIS 4.552 million at the start of the year to only NIS 0.192 million at the end, after a NIS 1.503 million fair-value gain, NIS 0.143 million of finance expense, and the NIS 3 million payment.
This is not just accounting noise. It is the balance sheet itself saying that the strong version of the deal has been cut back sharply. A remaining liability of NIS 0.192 million against a contractual maximum of NIS 3 million for 2026 means the model is assigning very little weight to the final earnout scenario. Not zero, but only a fraction.
What makes that even more interesting is the reason the company gives for the fair-value gain: an update to Liacom’s 2025 and 2026 revenue forecasts. In other words, even if the earnout mechanism is based on operating profit thresholds, the downward reset already came through lower revenue expectations first. That matters because it shows the revised read of the deal is not only about margin pressure or a one-off charge. It is also about a lower commercial trajectory than the one embedded around acquisition.
Liacom Is Not Alone: The Whole Goodwill Layer Sits On Recovery Paths
If Liacom were the only issue, the story might be contained within one acquisition. But the filing shows something broader: SPEEDVALUE’s entire goodwill layer rests on value-in-use tests that use high discount rates on one side, yet positive multi-year growth paths on the other, and in every case a 2% perpetual growth assumption beyond year five.
| Cash-generating unit | Net goodwill, NIS m | Pre-tax discount rate | Growth path used in the model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wall Dan + Code Value + Mankitak | 10.960 | 21.2% | 8%, 6%, 5%, 4%, 2% |
| Develop Soft | 5.581 | 19.5% | 15%, 12.5%, 10%, 7.5%, 5.5% |
| Code Agile | 1.741 | 25.5% | 16%, 8%, 6%, 4%, 2% |
| Cloudax | 1.730 | 20.7% | -23.4%, then 30%, 31%, 28.8%, 19.7% |
| Liacom | 11.530 | 21.6% | -3.25%, then 5%, 4.5%, 4.25%, 4% |
The right way to read this table is not that the company is making life easy for itself through low discount rates. It is doing the opposite on that front. But that does not automatically make the models conservative, because the other side of the equation still assumes quite a lot of execution. Develop Soft and Code Agile are expected to deliver double-digit growth early in the projection period. Cloudax is expected to move from a sharply negative first year to a very strong rebound. Liacom itself is assumed to move from a mild contraction to a positive path across the remaining years.
So Liacom has already shown what happens when one unit does not fully reach the trajectory embedded in the deal logic. The issue is not only the write-down already booked. It is the fact that the filing shows how sensitive the whole goodwill layer is to the path of growth from here. That is also why the auditor flagged goodwill impairment testing as a key audit matter: NIS 31.543 million of goodwill is not a technical line item. It is a sensitive estimate built on cash-flow forecasts, discount rates, and subjective judgment.
What This Changes In The SPEEDVALUE Read
The over-harsh reading would be that Liacom disproves the acquisition strategy. That is not what the filing says. Liacom contributed profit, the 2024 earnout was fully paid, and even after the impairment its use value still exceeded carrying value. But the too-soft reading would be to treat the impairment and the collapse of the contingent-consideration liability as mere accounting noise. That is also wrong.
The analytical implication is that SPEEDVALUE’s acquisition portfolio now has to be read differently. The question is no longer only whether each subsidiary adds revenue. It is whether each one also supports the valuation layer sitting above it. Liacom already says that this answer is not automatic.
Bottom Line
Liacom did not break SPEEDVALUE’s growth thesis. It broke the comfort with which the group’s goodwill layer could be read. At the activity level, this is still a profitable unit. At the purchase-price level, a haircut has already been taken. And at the contingent-consideration level, the balance sheet is now assigning very little weight to the optimistic 2026 scenario.
The current thesis: Liacom is no longer only an operating contribution inside the group. It is the first proof point that SPEEDVALUE’s goodwill layer is more fragile than the consolidated headline suggests.
What matters now is not only whether Liacom keeps earning money. The real watch item is whether 2026 restores a trajectory that can re-justify the remaining goodwill, and whether the other units actually deliver the growth paths their valuation models assume. If not, Liacom may turn out not to be the first exception, but the first signal.