Quotes About Profitability

The key, I think, from a business point of view, is to learn how to be efficient in making a record that's not too expensive, so that you're not going crazy spending tons of money making a product that might not ever return that money.

The value of a company selling a trendy product, such as television shopping, depends on the profitability of the product, the product life cycle, competitive barriers, and the ability of the company to replicate its current success. Investors are often overly optimistic about the sustainability of a trend, the ultimate degree of market penetration, and the size of profit margins.

Our struggle is to end a system that evaluates "worth" as a measure of market profitability, a system in which we are asked to believe—based on salaries paid—that the star athlete who helps a billionaire team owner increase his bottom line is "worth" more than a thousand teachers who help children escape poverty.

Instead of listening to Hoffman and his lapdog analysts, traders should have heeded the honest warning in Commerce One's annual report for 1999: "We have never been profitable. We expect to incur net losses for the foreseeable future and we may never be profitable.

The defensive investor must confine himself to the shares of important companies with a long record of profitable operations and in strong financial condition.

Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn't want to repeat "Steve Jobs's mistake" of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.

Bezos insisted the company needed to master anything that touched the hallowed customer experience, and he resisted any efforts to project profitability.

The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

Ultimately, the CCO is accountable for increasing the profitability of the firm's customers, as measured by metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer equity as well as by intermediate indicators, such as word of mouth (or mouse). Customer

Throughout human history, people have developed strong loyalties to traditions, rituals, and symbols. In the most effective organizations, they are not only respected but celebrated. It is no coincidence that the most highly admired corporations are also among the most profitable.

Competition on dimensions other than price - on product features, support services, delivery time, or brand image, for instance - is less likely to erode profitability because it improves customer value and can support higher prices. p.32

Understanding the competitive forces, and their underlying causes, reveals the roots of an industry's current profitability while providing a framework for anticipating and influencing competition (and profitability) over time. P. 26

The strongest competitive force or forces determine the profitability of an industry and become the most important to strategy formulation. The most salient force, however, is not always obvious. P. 26

If the forces are intense, (..) almost no company earns attractive returns on investment. If the forces are benign, (..) many companies are profitable. P. 25

Procurement sets fees based on a negotiated agreement about agency headcounts and costs, and (separately) marketing generates workloads for the agencies. Agencies, who measure client health through profitability measures alone, have no rigorous way to factor in client workloads. TABLE

One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition.

Up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go-go speed of grow at all costs. I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency," says Scott Cook, the Intuit founder and an Amazon board member during that time. "Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance. "Frankly, I didn't think he could do it.

In every company which I have done strategic planning, the number-one value people choose is always integrity. The second values may be quality of products and services, caring about people, excellent customer service, profitability , innovation, entrepreneurship, and others. But integrity always comes first.

Identify the 20 percent of your products and services that account for 80 percent of your sales and profits. How could you sell more of them?

The chicken industry tells the public that economic profitability cannot be achieved without careful attention to the welfare of the chicken, but this is not how the system actually works. Chickens can be profoundly mistreated and still "produce," just as profoundly mistreated humans can be overweight, sexually active, and able to produce offspring. Like humans, chickens can "adapt," up to a point, to living in slum conditions. Is this an argument for slums?

The Indians, they had found, were too unruly to keep as a labor force, and remained an obstacle to expansion. Black slaves were easier to control, and their profitability for southern plantations was bringing an enormous increase in the importation of slaves, who were becoming a majority in some colonies and constituted one-fifth of the entire colonial population. But the blacks were not totally submissive, and as their numbers grew, the prospect of slave rebellion grew.

Getting to profitability does not mean all our problems are solved.

high performers were twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals. And,

CFO GOALS Health of company Revenue Market share Average order size Profitability Return on assets Health of Finance Order to cash cycle Accounts receivable Accurate and timely financial reporting Borrowing costs