I was reading that eBay has just announced their first quarter earnings:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080416/earns_ebay.html
The e-commerce company reported net income of $460 million, or 34 cents per share, on revenue of $2.19 billion in the quarter that ended March 31. In the year-ago quarter, eBay earned $377 million, or 27 cents per share, on revenue of $1.77 billion.
So, I'm bad at math but $460M profit on $2.19B in revenue looks like a 20% profit margin. Not bad. Well, remembering all of the talks of "obscene profits" that the oil companies are making, I wanted to see what kind of profit margin Exxon-Mobile (the evilest of the evil) was generating. They haven't released Q1 earnings yet so I'll have to base it on last year's Q4 earnings. Looking at the numbers: it looks like $11.66B profit on $116.642B in revenue...or a 9.99% profit margin. So, eBay's profit is more than double Exxon-Mobile's and Exxon is the one with obscene profits? I love how we are calling for a special "wind-fall profits" tax on oil companies and they aren't even generating a double-digit profit margin. I can't wait to hear a proponent of these taxes describe what a "wind-fall profit" is. Because if a 9% profit margin is an obscene profit then just about every company in America is producing obscenity.
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Apparently windfalls are measured in absolute, rather than relative, terms. Just goes to show companies need to divide the profits up into small pieces (didn't Enron already prove that...)
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