How in the world does a company like Elsevier accrue $1.8 billion in expenses? Apple's 2015 worldwide operating expenses were $30 billion [0], or about 17 times higher. Yet Apple's costs for manufacturing, retail, sales, payroll, etc. ought to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than Elsevier's; Apple has 115,000 employees [1], for example, while Elsevier only has 7,200 [2].
It just seems that if their revenue is really $2.9 billion, then even if we weren't in an age of nearly expense-free digital distribution, Elsevier's profit margin should be far higher than it is.
What do they spend all that money on?
[0] http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Apple_(AAPL)/Data/Total_Opera...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
Edit: My employee-count example is a bad one, since the ratio of employees for each is about the same as the ratio of operating expenses. But Apple has huge R&D, manufacturing, and retail expenses. Elsevier's equivalents must be minute in comparison.