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Profits are to business what was smiley is in text messaging.
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When a company tells us in one of its regular announcements that it's making good profits, we assume it's doing well.
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Unfortunately, it may not be that simple.
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The company may be pulling the wool over our eyes.
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It may even be about to go belly up.
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Most people think that profits are what a company has left over after meeting its expenses.
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For a can of fizzy drink, this would be the retail price minus the cost of buying it at wholesale, and less any overheads, such as paying staff.
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Thank you.
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Profits come in different varieties just like fizzy drinks.
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But sometimes they can leave investors feeling decidedly flat.
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Understanding why companies emphasize different measures at different times gives us clues as to what they're really thinking.
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Profits before tax is the measure often quoted by FT journalists.
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Sometimes to the irritation of big companies.
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A simple definition is sales minus operating costs and interest payments, plus a share of returns from partner companies.
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Operating profits are seen as an even more straightforward measure.
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On the face of it, these are nothing more than sales minus operating costs.
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But even this is a little more complicated.
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First, sales may include money that the company hasn't received yet.
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Second, businesses have to deduct something for assets that are wearing out, like machinery, even if there's no cash cost.
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As a result, companies and investors prefer a measure with a dreadful acronym.
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This is Ebitda, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.
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Businesses also make up their own definitions of profits.
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The more convoluted these are, the less reliable they tend to be.
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Usually someone is trying to hide something.
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A company with simple operation that's doing well, is more likely to highlight a statutory measure like profits before tax than a rival that's doing badly.
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No discussion of profits and losses will be complete without a mention of kitchen sinking.
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When a new boss comes in to run a large corporation and clear up a mess left by the previous one, they may write off the value of assets such as liabilities and subsidiaries by quite large amounts.
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They may include everything up to, and including, the kitchen sink.
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Those write downs might have no cash cost, but the shares might fall anyway.
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They then have scope to rebound more steeply if profits recovered, assisted perhaps by write backs of value.
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The write backs in turn could boost the bonus of the chief executive.
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Accountants don't have many zingers, so it's worth quoting one of their few snappy lines: "Sales are vanity, profits are sanity, but cash is reality."
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It's meant to discourage companies going hell for leather for sales.
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The message is that bosses should prioritize cash receipts over profits too, which as we've seen can be pretty unreliable.
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Jonathan Gutherie, Financial Times, London.