Inventory as an asset

The company I used to work with usually holds a special inventory, a considerable amount of our own products for our R&D use for the development of next generation systems.  It is an inventory and an investment as well. Wall Street doesn't like that and usually considers it as a negative effect on the stock price. But we have to maintain those systems for new products.

I have no idea how they achieve an optimal quantity of that inventory. I doubt they ever use

any inventory control on it.

-Bing Liu