what is capitalization
How to Understand Business Capitalization. Capitalization is a measure of a company's total value. It is not the only measure, but one that financial investors use to appraise and value a company. Capitalization is not a measure of how much capital the company owns. On the contrary, financial accountants use the amount of capital under a business's ownership for their own methods of company valuation. Problems such as market crashes sometimes arise as a result of more than one method of valuing a business.