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Comment by mdemare | Hacker News Reader

They're bigger than Toyota. And that's the No 1 carmaker in the world. They're bigger than WalMart, bigger than any U.S. bank. They're valued at 13 million dollar per employee.

This can't be right, can it? There has to be more money in selling cars than in selling online text-ads, hasn't there?

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Google needs to buy Toyota while the valuation is still high.

Car makers have a very low profit margin. Toyota has about 7% (and that's very high for cars -- GM has like 1%). Google has about 30% profit margin. There's definitely a lot more money in cars in general (in terms of revenue), but Google's net income for 2006 was $1 billion more than GM, despite GM having about $197 billion more in revenue. Having high revenues doesn't mean you're making a lot in profit, which is what counts.

Though, GM is probably not the best example...it's bleeding cash at the moment, and has even had negative earnings some quarters.

If you want to play the profit game, compare Google's profit to Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil, and CitiGroup. We're not even in the same league here. In fact, we're not even in the same order of magnitude!

Again, Google making that list (and having a high market cap) is much more an effect of it's expected growth (and high multiple) than it's actual present value as a company.

Just nitpicking here, but Citigroup turned a loss this past quarter due to mortgage-backed security writedowns. I think Google actually turned a respectable profit.

Cars need ads to be sold. Ads don't need cars to be sold.

"There has to be more money in selling cars than in selling online text-ads". Now that was funny.

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