Look for companies with high profit margins.
By creating so many illusory images of physical perfection, whether on store aisles or storefronts ads, magazine covers or TV show, we speak more to the profit margins of companies than the self-esteem of today's girls.
Think how weird profit margins are: We've got high unemployment and financial crises - and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don't. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today's earnings.
Yeah, well, your people happen to be soul-sucking demons. (Wulf) You ever met a banker or a lawyer? Tell me who’s worse, my Urian or one of them? At least we need the food; they do it just for profit margins. (Phoebe)
Production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin.
Farms and ranches contend with much more than quarterly reports and profit margins - the weather can wreak havoc on their quality of life and economic viability. When natural disasters strike, we must do all we can to assist the backbone of our economy.
When a company is fairly certain of a profit margin that is substantial, it can assume responsibility for the clinical trials to develop a blockbuster drug.
Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"
Inflation, especially a slow steady rise in prices, encourages producers, because it means that they can commit themselves to costs of production on one price level and then, later, offer the finished product for sale at a somewhat higher price level. This situation encourages production because it gives confidence of an almost certain profit margin.
Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters.
The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they're doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent.
What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.
Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.
I have observed several hundred salespeople who were taught to use deceptive practices like 'bait and switch' and encouraged to play negotiation games with customers. They were so stressed by this behavior that they suffered from a high incidence of alcohol and substance abuse, divorce, job-jumping, and low productivity. In the same industry, I have observed countless people who had been taught to sell with high integrity. Ironically, their customer satisfaction, profit margins, and salesperson retention were significantly higher.
My understanding from talking to a lot of people in the business has been that it used to be that a newspaper was considered a community service. Now they're being run as profit centers, and they're trying to get pretty high profit margins. As a result, investigative reporting has been seen as a problem.
The U.S. and European markets have become mature, profit margins are lower, and equipment isnt so new. Because profits are relatively low, it limits the willingness of companies to invest in newer equipment.
I've always tried to keep my cover prices on the low side. I'm more interested in getting people to read the books we publish and less interested in the profit margin.
Not yet have I found any better method to prosper during the future financial chaos, which is likely to last many years, than to keep your net worth in shares of those corporations that have proven to have the widest profit margins and the most rapidly increasing profits. Earning power is likely to continue to be valuable, especially if diversified among many nations.
or simply:
