Concept of Evaluating Cluster Development Strategic Outlooks Using Multiples

This paper suggests an approach making it possible to recognize a core company of a future innovational and industrial cluster in order to subsequently expand this type of business up to a pilot cluster of the region. For that end, it is proposed to use book value multiples, Tobin's Q multiple and revenue multiples. They allow to determine whether the company in question will be able to become a core of a potential cluster in the very near future. The multiples can also help verify whether a large company meets its current position of the 'cluster core'. With this end in view, its book value multiple is compared with the profitability spread, and the revenue multiples are compared with the profit margin. If the values of the multiples are low, and the profitability spread and the profit margin are high, and if Tobin's Q multiple is greater than 1, the company is underestimated in the stock market and will be developing in years to come more rapidly than other companies in the industry or cluster.As a result, the following practical conclusions have been obtained. Comparison of JSC GAZ with two typical companies operating in the same industry, i.e. JSC AvtoVAZ and PJSC KAMAZ, has shown that this company was legitimately selected to be a core of the Nizhny Novgorod industrial innovation cluster. Moreover, comparing such GAZ brand's ratings of 68.58% and 84.31% of the company estimated value, this paper has come to the conclusion that a brand value is not an absolute measure but a relative one