I'm wondering why it's only 38%. They charge a lot and mostly work with volunteers. It should not cost 62% of what they charge to run a website to host some pdfs.
Elsevier is a pretty big company offering lots of different products and services[1]. I suspect even Elsevier is smart enough to see that the current publishing business isn't sustainable and are trying to pivot into something else. The profits from their publishing arm (which is undoubtedly a lot more than 38%) is no doubt financing a lot of that pivoting
They invest in making clinic decision support software to make research accessible
to doctors, etc (it’s practically also making decisions for them at times).
Source - have attended an Elsevier CDSS Sales presentation for HCPs
Distribution costs are negligible when you just make the PDFs free to everyone, but publishers spend a bunch of money on access control, security, and web interfaces that make you jump through hoops to download the actual PDF while doing everything possible to convince you to read the papers through their (possibly "social"/"collaborative") online platform instead.
This is the best breakdown I can find on their parent company RELX: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RELX/relx/cash-flo...