This case exposes students to various international business issues associated with the way different cultures represent numbers and dates, and inventory costing and impairment issues across three standard-setting regimes. The prior inventory case literature has focused on costing and impairment of finished goods inventories (e.g., Detzen, Wersborg, and Zülch 2015; Long, Mertins, and Searcy 2013); this case covers raw materials and work-in-process inventories. In addition, much of the prior case literature is limited to comparisons of U.S. GAAP to IFRS, whereas this case considers these issues from the perspective of U.S. GAAP, German GAAP, and IFRS.1
One of the unique challenges associated with this case is that the German accounting standards are not available in English. Nothhelfer (2017) provides an English summary of German GAAP. Instructors may wish to make a copy of this textbook available to their students to assist them in understanding how German GAAP...
