What does it say when a company shifts focus to increasing the gross revenue over profits? Or even increasing gross revenue at the expense of profits. What about the opposite where revenue growth is important, but emphasis is on profits?
Depends on context, but one scenario would be trying to reinvest in the business and pursuing growth/expansion.
Growth via stability. Vc based businesses are usually forced to be growth focused to justify ever growing valuations. Growing profits increases sustainability of the business. You usually see profit focus in downturns or after bubble pops and revenue focus pre pops as VCs try to force trade up of their shares to other investors.
Assuming you’re talking about a publicly traded company... Growth at all costs = Desperation. Either fixing themselves up for an acquisition or dressing up for a major sale of a business unit to raise cash. Source: seen this before. Revenue is king = keeping unreasonable promises to shareholders and/or activist investor calling the shots. Source: living this right now.
If the market they are in is a zero sum game, any additional revenue is at the expense of a rival. In the absence of innovation leading to new revenue generation opportunities, it might be sensible to simply try to starve out rivals and capture market share now and raise prices to boost profits later.
CEO's job is to maximize shareholder value. They do this by telling a compelling story - that is not just limited to profitability, could be subscriber growth, same store sales numbers, or just generic revenue numbers. You could potentially soften the blow of a drop in NI to your stock price by showing signs of life in the form of topline growth.
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Growing revenue is generally harder to achieve than cutting costs, it can help your forward valuation quite a bit