[conductr]

Agree. I work for a big healthcare company that likes to throw around the revenue numbers (pretty much all public companies do). Of course it's huge, cause healthcare is expensive (US). Our profit margin is like 2% cause COGS and labor is just as expensive and our top line revenue is basically just a made up number that we like to bill people, with no hopes of actually getting paid that amount, it's before the insurance companies "contractual adjustment", which is essentially a huge discount that we know invalidates top line.

[sfifs]

The question is so what if your profit margin is 2%. Are you big and expanding or are you contracting and belt tightening? Do your shareholders demand higher earnings? How much power do they have? Amazon famously zeroed out profits for a decade in pursuit of growth.

[conductr]

I get it. There's no one metric to rule them all. It's a narrative. But that's kind of my point, the obsession with revenue doesn't always make sense. For example, my company talks about growing revenue for many recent years. That's the biggest takeaway if you we're doing laymen research. However, we talk about it because it's a good story instead of mentioning that our margins are eroding. Actually, our business is shrinking but due to growing revenues nobody knows it. For us, revenue naturally grows at the same clip of healthcare cost. When that's 20% and we're growing by revenues by 15%, well most outsiders would not know we're shrinking.

[sfifs]

Ok I understand. Typically any public statements made by a company are carefully orchestrated PR because interests of management and key employees who are compensated in stock and options is tied to stock performing well (if public) or valuation remaining good (if private) and retaining the confidence of the board which represents shareholders and can fire them. In very large organizations, internal messaging about overall company financials are also carefully orchestrated (eg. Teleprompters are frequently used in internal "town-halls") because with so many people, internal communications are also quasi public, still messaging tends to be more blunt. However at a operational level, if you are seeing delusional communication, it's probably time to pack up your bags