Phones 4U said it had been a profitable business, with turnover of £1bn, underlying profits £105m in 2013 and plenty of cash in the bank, but that without the contracts from the phone networks it no longer had a business.
Amazon executives said that the revenue from those deals would supplement the company's earnings but that the underlying retail businesses would eventually be profitable on their own.
Even among some of the country's most profitable retailers, such as Next, underlying retail sales have gone into reverse.
Phones 4u said it remained profitable, with turnover of more than £1bn, underlying earnings of £105m in 2013 and significant cash in the bank.
But Netflix, and Blockbuster before them, are not the only winners, or even the most profitable winners, of keeping their market models and underlying technologies legal; ironically, the biggest winner might be the content industry.
Many investors concluded that Goldman retains underlying strength, despite serious questions about whether it can be as profitable as it once was.
It's his way of reducing Shell's problems to underlying components, distilling strategy into a mantra familiar to every executive: "More upstream, profitable downstream".
The business model underlying the company's remarkably lucrative inkjet printer business -- low-cost printers and profitable ink -- is something the company stumbled upon by accident.
But it is the private and very profitable Western commercial and investment banks that have provided the financial plumbing underlying many of the transactions under investigation.
