Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
The only data needed is "For the financial year ending ...
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Suppose that Amazon paid a billion dollars for eBooks, and sold them to customers for a billion dollars.
They actually would be losing a lot on those books for reasons such as:
-- Payments to credit card companies.
-- Costs of their data processing infrastructure
-- Cost of funds (Amazon doesn't have a lot of corporate debt, but they have some)
-- Taxes (if no profit, you don't pay corporate income tax, but there are other taxes)
-- General corporate expenses ranging from rent to salaries to paying your law and accounting firms
Some of these expenses would be incurred even if they stopped selling eBooks. The question then becomes the extent to which a line of business, such as eBooks, is responsible for overall corporate expenses.
It seems to me that figuring out whether books are being sold at a loss is complex and filled with judgment calls.