This can also help explain why the lowest margin activities -- like manufacturing -- are increasingly outsourced to low-cost countries.
Older mountain ranges, eroded by weathering and runoff, mark zones of earlier plate-margin activity.
Viacom's Blockbuster film-rental business, for instance, a low-margin activity, is at long-term risk from video-on-demand and digital downloading.
Selling gasoline is also a relatively low-margin activity; in 2002, the last year for which statistics are available, gasoline sales accounted for 62percentt of total convenience store sales but just 40percentt of profit.
Companies use the term "commodity business" to describe humdrum, low-margin activities.
His answer is to combine a low-cost approach with a continued focus on high-margin activities where there is more fat to trim.
Under Mr Immelt the firm has got out of some low-margin activities, such as plastics, and belatedly sold its sprawling media empire, NBCUniversal.
Though it is hard to fault Mr Immelt's strategy of shifting GE's portfolio from low-margin to high-margin activities, his seven years at the helm have not impressed investors.
Bangladesh has seen particularly strong growth in the last few years, partly because of rising labor costs in China, where manufacturing is moving into higher-margin activities like product design.
The same goes for steel, aluminium, energy, finance and a host of other areas that the government deems "strategic .A more durable model for less privileged companies would involve more higher-margin activities, based on innovation and higher quality, with their home-grown brands to the fore.
