So Walmart only has a 3% profit margin … thats very slim
CoverComprehensive33 on
20 Billions looking all slim up there 🙄
SunshineBear100 on
Now do healthcare companies
RollFirstMathLater on
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.
georgealice on
What is the difference between “operating expenses” and “cost of sales” ?
andrew_kirfman on
More than half a trillion dollars of sales in a year for only 20B in actual net profit is wild.
lawnboy22 on
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.
toolkitxx on
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.
Mr_1990s on
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.
BrewsWithTre on
Can someone explain to me what is typically done with 20 billion dollars in profit?
skurvecchio on
IANAA: can someone explain the difference between cost of sales and operating expenses?
zambulu on
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.
vagaliki on
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?
highzunburg on
A lot of people here don’t understand operating expenditures. That is profit they roll over to not pay taxes basically “hey we need this money for future of the business.” That 3% is what they paid out and paid taxes on. Saying their margin is only 3% is incredibly misleading.
rambolo68 on
Roughly 2.96% profit margin. I always crack up when people disparage Walmart. They are 1 or 2 bad decisions from going out of business when the profit margin is that low. The company gets to keep less than 3 cents for every dollar it takes in for goods sold.
![[OC] Walmart’s latest Billions visualized](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/f9lq8fe444le1-1536x960.png "[OC] Walmart’s latest Billions visualized")
16 Comments
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?
A lot of people here don’t understand operating expenditures. That is profit they roll over to not pay taxes basically “hey we need this money for future of the business.” That 3% is what they paid out and paid taxes on. Saying their margin is only 3% is incredibly misleading.
Roughly 2.96% profit margin. I always crack up when people disparage Walmart. They are 1 or 2 bad decisions from going out of business when the profit margin is that low. The company gets to keep less than 3 cents for every dollar it takes in for goods sold.