Yearly revenue vs. profit for Microsoft
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they know how to make money, and lots of it. The company that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world has managed to stay profitable every single year since 1985 (which is when they went public and our numbers start).
Yearly revenue vs. profit for Apple
You can clearly see how Apple stumbled in the 1990s. The company was growing its revenue up until 1995, but profits didn't really keep up and revenue started plummeting. Apple even started losing money for a while.
It's no wonder Apple was desperate to get Steve Jobs back in 1997. Their revenues were going down, they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Apple needed to be saved. And now in retrospect we can see that after a few rough years, he did just that. Once Apple had gone through the initial fiddling with everything from introducing Mac OS X, switching to the Intel platform, and introducing the iPod, both revenue and profits started to soar. Apple is way bigger and way more successful now than the company has ever been.
Yearly revenue vs. profit for Google
Google's graph shows how steadily the company has been growing. It's been a model of profitability. Revenue has been rising rapidly, and so has profit.
And profits in fact are a highly variable thing. Microsoft had 49 billion in cash from profits, going into the 2000s but now they face a quite different scenario.I prefer arguments based on some historical data and trends over the last century; such critical thinking and arguments tend to bear out in reality of the markets. The last century is littered with tech and non-tech corpses of companies with very high margins, refusing to even indulge low end markets their customers are flocking to (I mentioned Kodak and Polaroid specifically but there are 100s of examples in last 100 years). What we call "disruptive forces" the book "Cross The Chasm" documents this well and how dangerous it can be to dismiss competitors with lower margins taking new customers at an alarming rate, and starting to cut down the high profit market % winners in the long term. Android phones by the numbers and all marketing history threaten the iPhones market big time over the next 3-10 years maybe even enough to cause a collapse in the high profits Apple enjoy if not countered soon before its too late.
On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Jim Saklad <jimdoc@icloud.com> wrote:
> At 0% profit Samsung wont cut it. Google will make money in the play store. Samsung will need profits to survive. Apple had both hardware profits and App Store profits and media store profits and Macintosh profits and iPod profits to fall back on. Me thinks they will do just fine.> KLM
For the 4th quarter of 2012, Samsung's profit almost exactly matched Apple's, at $8.3 billion.
Apple did it, however, with a 40% margin.
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Jim Saklad mailto:jimdoc@icloud.com
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