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Comment by andirk | Hacker News Reader

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A 95% drop in profit doesn’t mean they sold nothing.

Looking at profit alone doesn’t tell how much product they actually shipped. It might be that they sold more units but at razor-thin margins.

It's profit they are looking at, not revenue.

Just splurging on new sites/equipment/assets could drop their profit to zero while their income remained the same.

Note that "new sites/equipment/assets" are depreciated over their estimated useful life - they impact profit (i.e. net income) gradually over time.

You seem to be confusing profit with revenue. You can sell a bunch of stuff and not make a profit.

I'm pretty sure the clickbait headline is designed to cause that confusion.

How? The headline is both correct and very clear, it’s just four words. If the reader doesn’t understand what profit means, the problem is on their side.

People blame the media for the weirdest things these days.

FYI it's neither correct nor very clear in that Samsung Electronics is not Samsung (the overall group).

That’s a great point! The corporate structure of Samsung is confusing to me. I have no idea which subsidiaries report separately and why.

But the problem with the headline is not that it somehow sneakily conflates revenue and profit.

Wikipedia to the rescue, but that complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung

I would argue it's a little bit of both. You have to admit, they deliberately are taking advantage of the fact that this sounds like a very interesting statistic "wow!! Profit fell by this huge amount!!" when a lot of it could be a very deliberate decision by the company to spend more money. If revenue fell by more than profit, they would pick that instead.

The standard for headlines is to get the reader to click, not to inform the reader (even when the article itself is quite informative). I've been reading books with marketing advice, and one of them literally suggests the practice of "false facts," where you deliberately compare things that shouldn't be compared in order to make your product seem more appealing, for example an audiobook that costs $25 to an in-person class that costs $10,000. This headline is kinda-sorta doing that, albeit on a scale of 2/10.

It feels like HN should be one of the places that best understands this.

I agree. I misunderstood profit as gross income, and even with a quarter of negative profit, a business may very well be doing fine depending on their profit margin (electronics ~2-10%).

Maybe they made similar revenues but massively increased costs. Amazon was famous for this sort of thing.

From the article: Revenue fell 18% to 63.7 trillion won.

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