[sjy]

Goodwill refers to the part of the price that is based on "looking at the current annual income and projecting growth over a few years." It's the value over and above what you would get if you emptied the company bank accounts and sold all its other property in a fire sale. It's a perfectly sensible concept, even if the process of quantifying it by coming up with a price "based on" current income and anticipated growth (or other advantages like eliminating competition) is contestable.