So Walmart only has a 3% profit margin … thats very slim
20 Billions looking all slim up there 🙄
Now do healthcare companies
It’s crazy to see how much money is spent just to get items in front of people.
All of the logistics, staffing, human rights violations, just to get a measley 3%. Sure 20b is 20b, but god damn, crazy to see it drawn out like this.
What is the difference between “operating expenses” and “cost of sales” ?
More than half a trillion dollars of sales in a year for only 20B in actual net profit is wild.
So this is after they’ve paid all their employees right? Seems odd why we wouldn’t just taxes these companies a little more and then maybe we wouldn’t have to cut all these jobs and leave people unemployed. Idk, that’s just me, but it’s possible I just don’t understand it all.
I often question the usefulness of Sankey diagrams for this and this is one of the examples, that look nice but show the data in a imho wrong way.
Profits are the result of expenses after revenue and yet here they appear parallel to them.
P.S. Since this seems to be unclear: Cost of sales is the flow – the result is the gross profit state. Which are disconnected in the current visualization.
Comments are right about Walmart historically having a fairly low margin compared to other major companies, but I’m curious about how that might change moving forward as it continues to embrace higher margin products. Walmart made over $4 billion in advertising last year. If that and stuff like Walmart+ continue to grow, it’ll be interesting to see if/how their overall margin changes.
Can someone explain to me what is typically done with 20 billion dollars in profit?
IANAA: can someone explain the difference between cost of sales and operating expenses?
I’d wonder how much compensation is included in the expenses. Like how non-profits work, for instance – the corporation might not make money, but they could be paying the execs $80 million and consider it an expense.
If their interest expense is down 40% does that mean they’re not issuing new loans and therefore not expecting to invest as much in new processes, tech, etc in the next few years?
![[OC] Walmart’s latest Billions visualized](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/f9lq8fe444le1-1920x1024.png)
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Source: [Walmart investor relations](https://corporate.walmart.com/content/dam/corporate/documents/newsroom/2025/02/20/walmart-releases-q4-fy25-earnings/q4-fy25-earnings-release.pdf)
Tool: [SankeyArt](http://sankeyart.com) sankey maker +illustrator
So Walmart only has a 3% profit margin … thats very slim
20 Billions looking all slim up there 🙄
Now do healthcare companies
It’s crazy to see how much money is spent just to get items in front of people.
All of the logistics, staffing, human rights violations, just to get a measley 3%. Sure 20b is 20b, but god damn, crazy to see it drawn out like this.
What is the difference between “operating expenses” and “cost of sales” ?
More than half a trillion dollars of sales in a year for only 20B in actual net profit is wild.
So this is after they’ve paid all their employees right? Seems odd why we wouldn’t just taxes these companies a little more and then maybe we wouldn’t have to cut all these jobs and leave people unemployed. Idk, that’s just me, but it’s possible I just don’t understand it all.
I often question the usefulness of Sankey diagrams for this and this is one of the examples, that look nice but show the data in a imho wrong way.
Profits are the result of expenses after revenue and yet here they appear parallel to them.
P.S. Since this seems to be unclear: Cost of sales is the flow – the result is the gross profit state. Which are disconnected in the current visualization.
Comments are right about Walmart historically having a fairly low margin compared to other major companies, but I’m curious about how that might change moving forward as it continues to embrace higher margin products. Walmart made over $4 billion in advertising last year. If that and stuff like Walmart+ continue to grow, it’ll be interesting to see if/how their overall margin changes.
Can someone explain to me what is typically done with 20 billion dollars in profit?
IANAA: can someone explain the difference between cost of sales and operating expenses?
I’d wonder how much compensation is included in the expenses. Like how non-profits work, for instance – the corporation might not make money, but they could be paying the execs $80 million and consider it an expense.
If their interest expense is down 40% does that mean they’re not issuing new loans and therefore not expecting to invest as much in new processes, tech, etc in the next few years?
Comments are closed.