Earnings Driver

How Companies Make Money, and What Drives It

What makes a business profitable?

A filling station earns cents a gallon on the fuel — the money is in the shop behind it. Costco sells groceries near cost and takes its markup at the door. What a company sells is rarely what it earns on.

Earnings Driver runs one plain line — Profit = (Price × Quantity) − Cost — across industry after industry, from a grain elevator to a stealth fighter, hunting the few forces that move each profit most.

• Why Hermès earns more by selling less
• Why pricing power comes from being hard to replace
• A field guide to the shapes industries reuse

Business stops looking like a thousand separate puzzles, and starts to look like a smaller set of structures in different clothes.

Coming soon. Leave your email and I'll tell you the day it's out — with a free sample chapter.

By Heejung Chang, CFA · Published by DTC Global Research.