I realize that I should have been more precise. I was talking about profit in the colloquial sense where profit = revenues - cost and not the GAAP meaning.
For instance, even when Amazon was “losing money” for years, they were using cash flow to expand. If they were running short of money, they could have just stopped building infrastructure. They had marginal profit unlike companies that are losing money on each sell.
There's a difference between the start of the dictionary definition of profit
a) noun 1. a financial gain
and
b) GAAP profits
Amazon has made loads of a) and not much b). Perhaps not coincidentally b) are what you are taxed on.
The financial gains made by shareholders in each over the last 5 years as reflected in increase in market cap are about the same for both - $626bn for apple, $648bn for amzn.
For those not into accounting, roughly how it works is if your basic sales are $10bn, costs $8bn then you can put the $2bn in the bank (apple) or spend and expense it on stuff that will increase market share (amazon).
The term profit covers a number of metrics. All of them are abstractions. The number of assumptions that go into a GAAP profit figure is uncountable. Profit on a cash basis is less wiggly, but it's still--for valuation purposes--useful only inasmuch as it is an estimate of actual cash returns on the investment.
> you bring in more money than you spend, it means that you don’t have to worry about a “runway”, nor do you have to worry about outside funding
Lots of ways for cash-flow positive businesses to be running themselves into the ground. Garden variety is off balance sheet liabilities, though people certainly
> How can you have a successful business that spends more money than you make?
Nobody argued this, not for the long term. But there are loads of situations in which losing money in the short term is the long-term savvy move. (This literally describes all investing. You send cash out when you invest.) Valuation involves estimating the value of those future earnings today.
This post is making an error, or at least a poor choice in terminology, when thinking profit only means GAAP accounting or taxable profit.
Malone cut costs by reducing tax liability, getting better prices on programming, and increasing the subscriber base (revenue). What's that word for revenue minus expenses again?
A more honest explanation: Accounting depreciation != the actual change in value of things, and the cash flow statement can let you know when GAAP accounting isn't giving an accurate picture of success.
And about Malone's insight on leverage: Leverage ups your return on investment (when things don't blow up). Paying interest doesn't help you hide money from the tax man any better than setting dollar bills on fire would, but leverage can make big things happen from small amounts of investment.
Really? Sure, a division can operate at a profit, or a product can be profitable while the rest of the enterprise is on fire, but profitable has a pretty solid definition in the GAAP world, doesn't it? Now I could totally see uber using all sorts of non-GAAP E.B.(some bullshit we haven't even thought up yet) metrics and those numbers can indicate favorable growth and a direction of future profitability but you couldn't seriously refer to that as "profit" when dealing with real investors.
I have not. I used the term "gross profit," which is reported on their annual income statement exactly as I suggested. You can argue whether I should have talked about their net losses, but you can't claim I've confused anything. You don't need to operate at a net profit in order to be able to devote resources to a strategy that you value as a company, but you do need cash flow.
I mean sure, there are. In fact, there are lots of pretty standard ideas of what constitutes profitability. But if you just say, we're profitable, most people will assume you mean on a GAAP net income basis. If you don't mean that, you can say, we're cash flow positive or something like that. Or you could say, "we're profitable on an EBIT basis," or we have a positive gross margin. You can't just say, hey! if you exclude a bunch of our costs and count all of our revenue, the revenue is bigger!
1. Profit/loss measures changes in equity resulting from operating activity, as opposed to financing activities (which just rearrange how the company is financed).
2. Examples of financing activities are taking out (or paying back) loans, issuing (or buying back) shares, and issuing dividends.
3. Some (not all, as you point out!) of those financing activities will increase or decrease equity. So, when thinking about profit as the rate of change of book value, you should be careful add back any changes that are the result of financing activities. (specifically: ignore changes in equity due to money going to, or coming from, shareholders)
Accounting profit is literally revenue minus appropriate cost analysis. You can't determine profit without appropriate cost. That's the point of the paper and my contention. You're wrong. Stop gaslighting.
Right, thanks for clarifying - I had meant earnings of a company as well (or any task that gets done and has a 'profit' associated); perhaps earnings wasn't an appropriate word to for me to use.
The times they didn't make profit were periods where massive investment in production infrastructure was occurring. To me that makes complete logical sense regarding investing in the business versus extracting cash (profit) and starving the business.
Profit is an accounting term, so ambiguous. To be actually clear, it would be useful to qualify it as "taxable profit" or "investor profit," for example. In practice, these are two unrelated numbers for most big companies. Each one is defined by who you are communicating to, and what the rules are for this communication.
You might also have "management profit," a catch-all term for unstandard & unregulated metrics. For example, A business graduates from "cash accounting" for tax and investor purposes... but it's still useful for the old management to track the old definition of profit. Maybe because habits. Maybe because it tracks cash flow or is useful some other way.
It's one of those pomo problems. The SEC, IRS or bank manager will not stand for "SEC Profit." They want "real" profit. It's like a naive local politician demanding to know what the hospital "really" cost the contractor.
Anyway.... like the SEC, IRS and such... author is using terms from their own perspective. When they say "Open Source does not win by being cheaper," "open source" specifically refers to an open source business modeled after MongoDB or similar. So yes, investors, growth goals and such are implied.
He clarifies himself on this point and there's no real point taking it into semantic growling.
Profit (whether gross, operating, or net) is also an imperfect measure. For many extremely fast growing companies, being profitable is a bad thing; it's what happens when they run out of ways to re-invest revenue into growth.
For instance, even when Amazon was “losing money” for years, they were using cash flow to expand. If they were running short of money, they could have just stopped building infrastructure. They had marginal profit unlike companies that are losing money on each sell.
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