The phrase "a mere business" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to emphasize that something is only a business, often implying a lack of significance or depth.
Example: "To him, the project was just a mere business venture, lacking any personal connection or passion."
Alternatives: "just a business" or "only a business".
But the issue is not a mere business spat to be resolved between Comcast and Netflix.
LIKE so many other high-technology companies during the boom, MicroStrategy thought of itself as more than a mere business.
It was a telling choice of words — an utterance so evocative of gallant sacrifice and heroic last stands, yet made in connection with a mere business issue.
"A mere business relationship between parties dealing at arm's length does not give rise to fiduciary duties," Mr. Thibodeau's lawyers wrote, citing two examples of case law.
Far from a mere business functionary, the government says, Mr. el-Hage was a "front man," creating fictitious companies to hide Mr. bin Laden's activities.
When an organization is spending hundreds of thousands or millions on a technology integration, the trust fostered through a partnership versus a mere business transaction can save time, resources and headaches — and that's the type of peace of mind you can't get just anywhere.
There he ran a group of a dozen analysts at a time when mere business models "were going public at billion-dollar valuations," he said.
John Prescott, complaining on Desert Island Discs about being mocked for his working-class roots, or Dennis Skinner, an unabashed class warrior, are as much anachronisms as Nicholas Soames, scion of the aristocratic Churchills, who certainly took a snobbish view of mere business.
"There is little sense, though," Spencer complains, "of a man who finds the mere business of getting through each day unbearable".
The Pequots, like all Indian gambling operators, are no mere business enterprise but a sovereign nation, exempt from most commercial regulations and almost certainly unable to use the bankruptcy laws or sell off gambling assets that could be operated by others.
These pressures have made the steel industry a mere "conversion business", making wafer-thin profits, at best, by transforming ore into metal, laments Colin Hamilton of Macquarie, a bank.China's continuing economic growth offers the prospect of its excess capacity eventually being used up, if the central government can somehow restrain local authorities' zeal for new plants.
