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by mbesto 808 days ago
percentage != absolute value

This is like saying walmart isn't highly profitable...you make up for it in volume.

1 comments

Discussing nominal profits when comparing various businesses' "profitability" is almost never productive.

Any business needs a certain amount of cushion to counter volatility, and to earn a return for shareholders. If you had a business with $1M of revenue and $20k of profit, surely you would not expect $20k of profit when you hit $2M of revenue (because 2% profit margin is objectively very low. I have yet to see of successful businesses operate year after year on less than that, and at 0% they become a charity).

Hence profit margin is almost always the relevant figure, especially when you get down to the low single digit percentages.