31–40 of 130 posts
“Your margin is my opportunity” Absent a true monopoly or government protection high margin businesses are usually those most ripe for disruption. Someone eventually comes along and, for various reasons, is willing to make far lower margin and then the battle begins. Lots of sleepy high margin businesses out there just waiting to get picked off by a new entrant.
> Divide a company's income by its revenue If I'm a person who believes income is the same thing as revenue, how would you explain this division to me in a way I'd understand? Or does "income" in this case mean "profit"?
Revenue is what you sell your product for. Income is what you sit with after all the expenses and taxes have been deducted from the retail price. Let's say you create some product, XYZ, which takes you exactly 5 hours to make. The materials to make the product costs you $50, the salary costs $100 ($20/hr * 5 hours), the shop costs (rent, utilities, etc.) costs roughly $5 pr product. And the things involved in selling…
I found the per calculation highly suspicious, especially the first row: > Country Median Margin Average Margin Sample Size > South Africa 28.86% 82.37% 7 How can the average be 82% with a median being 28% without having one that is above 100%?
This is an excellent article, but the graph is unreadable on mobile even with a relatively large screen.
For the benefit of you and other small viewport users, here's an image of the plot, with a line indicating where the median is the same as the mean. https://i.xkqr.org/medianvsmeanmargin.png Though I do recommend exploring the plot on a full-size monitor too – it's zoomable etc.
This article compares the gross profit vs. net profit differences by industry.
https://www.venasolutions.com/blog/average-profit-margin-by-...
hmm yes but also most great startups have a negative operating margin on paper since they re-invest almost all their earnings into development, marketing, etc... just dividing earnings by revenue won't give meaningful insight in most companies that intend to grow or expand.
And for the classic HN comment about the site itself: I think it looks very nice, but the native justification algorithm is not very good (especially with hyphenation turned off) so it ends up looking quite sparse at parts on mobile and is a bit jarring to read. I'm a big fan of this implementation [1] of the TeX linebreak algorithm for the web, and think it would make this site look even better with minimal effort.
Good article although especially in tech it’s not so simple. Thanks to games with depreciation and other financial engineering a company may look “profitable” but still be quite unhealthy or at risk. One generally needs to look at “profit” in the context of cash flow. I.e. a company could be “profitable” but also basically broke at the same time with no cash to pay people or suppliers.