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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

95% “plunge” is a funny number for profit: sounds catastrophic but there could be many stories behind it. Including higher R&D.

Revenue 95% plunge would be somewhat different!

Margin 95% plunge would too.

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Yup. Unlike revenue, profits can turn negative, in which case % changes become nonsensical.

I'm not sure; I think "Samsung Profits Plunge 200%" would be pretty easy to make sense of, in that it would mean "They lost as much this [period] as they gained last [period]". Likewise, you could represent that as -200% change, or -100% of last quarters profits.

If profit can refer to a loss then why would you assume they had a positive profit in the last period? Perhaps not quite so easy to make sense of.

In any case, hopefully next quarter their losses can crater by 2000%, i.e., go from a small profit to a larger one and get back to about where they were.

Don’t forget to average the logs not the %’s :-)

What do you mean?

It's still pretty meaningless unless you have some idea what the previous profit was (which the average headline reader probably doesn't). 95% of last quarter's profit could be a trivial amount or a huge amount. If last quarter's profit was $100 and this quarter's was $5, describing it as a "plunge" is misleading as it hasn't really changed.

it is due to diving demand and miscalculated orders, so it is indeed unintentional plunge.

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