this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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I don't understand why companies need to grow when they already produce big or even obscene profits every year
Because it's driven by shareholders. Consistent profits is fine for the company itself to continue operating, but doesn't typically move the needle on stock prices. The amount that shareholders would get as dividend payouts for a consistently profitable company is completely trivial compared against what they get if the share price grows by 20%.
This is a big part of the reason why publicly traded companies are so growth obsessed, often to the detriment of the actual product/service they're providing, their customers, or their employees.
Their customers then, are the shareholders and not the people who buy their products or services. What happens if they lose the shareholders? If the company already is making enough money to support it self, what is the need for shareholders?
If the company is publicly traded and has shareholders, then it doesn't have enough money to support itself. When you're buying a share in the company, what you're effectively doing is giving such company a loan. And you expect your money back. Plus interest.
Let's imagine a very simplified example. Company X plans to produce goods valued at $1,000 and they need $990 to produce them (that uncludes all the operational costs like materials, wages, taxes, marketing, etc). They aim for 1% profit margin ($10) at the end of they year. The problem? X management only has $900 in cash. So how can they achieve their goal? One option would be to fire some people, produce less goods and earn less money. Another option would be to seek investment for $90.
Again, this is a very simplified example. So, they go public and create shares which they value at $90. You go and them. Everything looks great, right?
Now the year passes. Balance at the start was $900 + $90 = $990. Then they spend $990 on manufacturing and their balance became $990 - $990 = $0.
X had a great year, they sold everything, there were no issues, happy days! So, $0 + $1,000 = $1,000. But you ask for your loaned money back. So, $1,000 - $90 = $900. And they can't produce $1,000 worth of goods next year, because they lack your $90.
What X needs to do is to either increase their profit margin in some way to cover your loan or find a way not to give your money back to you. In short, they are either now permanent slaves to shareholders or they need HUGE profit margin, which is not always possible. And when you start factoring in taxes, inflation, reserve funds, etc, company liability just grows sky high.
The reality is that running a business is very hard. US has tens of millions of registered companies and corporations. But you only hear about a few rich outliers in the news. Because majority of them are barely surviving.
If they lose the shareholders? That only means shareholders are seeking their shares, they go to another shareholder or are getting bought back by the company... If everyone is selling then the share price is driven down (too much offer) and the company might end up getting delisted from major exchanges, it doesn't mean they don't make a good product or whatever, but if everyone is jumping ship then there usually is a reason for it...
The company makes profit from shareholders only when it's their own shares that they're selling or when new shares are being bought, so initial offering, subsequent offerings (increasing the total number of shares that exist, current shareholders might not appreciate it). Going back to being private after finding success (buying back all the shares on the market) is usually so expensive that it's not something the company will consider doing, especially at that means depending on private investments to raise capital instead of being able to simply sell shares owned by the company or emit more shares.
But following the line of thought, where growth is being seeked for the sake of investors, denying that growth, would make the prices fall making it cheaper to buy them back. If a company stops trying to grow after it has found success, established itself and makes a good or even extremely high profit, wouldn't it be best to just stop growing and let investors seek other companies that seek to grow?
Sure but investors have a say in how the company manages its finances so they won't vote in favor of crashing the share price so the company can buy them back for cheap!
In a better market investors would expect their profit from well established companies to come from dividends and the share price would be fairly stable so investors looking for high profits would sell shares from established companies with stable dividends to people who want safe investments and would move on to growing companies where they could potentially make profit from the share price increasing rapidly until the company reaches a point where it's stable...
That exists, plenty of huge companies that pay good dividends with share prices that are moving at snail pace (look at the share price of IBM vs Apple for the last 25 years or so), but these days that's not what investors want, they expect profit from the line going up and selling their shares 🤷
Even then, just like you expect a pay increase to follow inflation, people expect their profit from a company to go up with time, may it be from the price going up or from dividends increasing...
Companies do not generally go public and start offering shares just for the fun of it. They need that influx of money from the initial offering for one reason or another. A company's overall margin is also generally not very large, especially compared to its market cap, which is what would need to be bought back. Amazon's profit of ~10 billion is trivial in comparison to their market cap of 1.5 trillion. Even their total annual revenue is still only about a tenth of that. They'd need to shrink by at least an order of magnitude for a buyback to even be possible, let alone plausible.
TL;DR: It is extraordinarily rare for a publicly traded company to have the cash flow necessary to consider buying itself back.
IIRC, in the US, a CEO's job is maximising shareholder value, and failing to do so is malpractice.
When you put it like that, it almost sounds like a scam
The fiduciary responsibility is a little misunderstood. The CEO can't intentionally run the business into the ground but can do things like post short term losses in order to reinvest in development or restructuring, they can be honest when paying their taxes and so forth. The law doesn't require CEOs to be total sociopaths, they do that part all on their own.
Shareholders definitely add to the problem, but one of the inherent flaws in capitalism is that there is a natural growth imperative.
From a macroeconomic perspective governments and economies require growth to insure political stability for consumers and producers. There's also a need to recoup the amount of currency that banks take out of circulation.
From a microeconomic perspective the growth imperative is driven by the inherent mechanisms of competition and accumulation. Basically, the only way to stay in competition is to increase the investment into a company's future profits.
It's not enough. They don't have all of the money yet.
Even if they had all the money, the expectation is that they would have more than all the money next quarter. Publicly traded corporations are cancer.
There are many reasons.
For example, there's a legal reason - if the management of a public company doesn't do everything in its power to grow the business, such management is facing criminal charges.
There's a financial reason - if the profit margin is below inflation, then the company is losing money and will go bankrupt over time.
Tax structure is also a reason. The company is not allowed to hoard money, excessive income is heavily penalised by taxes. So the company is forced to reinvest and grow.
There are other reasons as well. Most of them exist to protect the population from financial crime of all sorts. One way or another.
But obscene profits don't mean shit, only profit margin does. If your profit is $1b, but your margin is just 1%, then your business is dying as it doesn't even cover inflation. You're losing money in real terms, even with a spare $1b in your bank account.
So 8 people can live a better life than god while the rest of us shoot each other for overpriced and unhealthy food
So the stock price goes up.
The amount is irrelevant, only the growth matter! It's an addiction probably. Or maybe a missing kpi...
Right?? How much bigger does Amazon think it needs to be? It's already all the way big!