But for purposes of doing a clean profitability comparison, gross margin or the popular measure of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA)–does the trick.
The profitability of institutional asset management increased slightly after years of decline, though for most players this improvement was hardly enough to cover the cost of doing business.
Incidentally, Southwest Airlines, which last week announced its 39th consecutive year of profitability, does not charge penalty fees for changing a reservation.
And while Google has hinted that YouTube, a hub for display ads, is on the verge of profitability, it did not announce on Thursday that the video site was profitable, as some analysts expected it might.
On the other hand, in the rainfed AEZs, the profitability of irrigated agriculture does not rise as sharply as for rainfed production, and therefore, the irrigated area does not experience the same strong expansion.
"There is no other company in the entire world that has the consistently abominable rate of profitability they do and yet has the stratospheric valuation they do".
Google has a track record of profitability; MySpace does not.
We can see that they're young, smart, prematurely cynical and fully aware of both the superficiality and profitability of what they do for a living.
If it does not address this problem, the message the Government is sending to today's savers is 'Why bother?' Don Cruikshank, the man the Government put in charge of unearthing the truth behind the profitability of our banks, did not disappoint when he delivered his report last Monday.
This followed a 4.1 per cent fall in underlying clothing and homeware sales over the year, but the main damage to its profitability was done by £100.9m of exceptional items, notably costs of £75.3m from buying back bonds.
