| > as if this might be close to reasonable estimate of the profit off these farm repair contracts. I took the math you proposed but I used revenue instead of profit. "Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams" If the general idea of that calculation is wrong, it's your fault. And obviously not all of that extra revenue can be profit, but most of it can. It's enough to make "tiny fraction" still work out well. > Why pick revenue? Why not profit before taxes? Why not profit after taxes? Why not any of a ton of more relevant variables? Because forcing people to use your parts/services brings in extra business. Revenue. I already explained why not profit. If the company broke even, using profit would declare they could not have possibly made money on the program. If they lost money overall, calculating a percent of profit would declare that this behavior must have lost them money. It makes absolutely no sense to use profit in this calculation. > Their net profit is around 10% of revenue, not at all out of line for companies in this sector. If you're going to magically claim that 40% of this profit is from farm contracts, that is massively ignorant of what they sell. Why couldn't it be? Let's consider a hypothetical. Red Moose sells $30B in tractors and the cost of doing that is $31B. But they have an anti-competitive program that brings in $4B on $1B in cost. Their overall profit is $2B, but the profit from that specific program is $3B. Despite being only 12% of their company, it brings in all of their overall profit (arguably 150% of their overall profit). It's very easy for one piece of a company to make most of the profit. It's not magic. > Since you seem unable to look at their financials, there's no need for me to show you how little of their overall revenue is farm equipment They break out everything by equipment market and I couldn't find anything granular enough to figure out how much is servicing. I looked the first time I posted. If you have something better feel free to quote it. But talking about how much is farm equipment seems pointless to me. We should be looking at how much the company could plausibly make by spiting right to repair on all equipment, farm and construction and everything. > (which if course makes your number voodoo even more out of touch) Again, all I did was take the math you suggested except I used "revenue" instead of "profit" for a good reason. |