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Nollij@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago(Not OP) There is some truth to it, though. Profitability and stock price are, at best, loosely related. There was a time (possibly right now; I didn’t bother to check) where Tesla’s market cap (total value of all stock) was higher than the entire rest of the automakers combined. This is despite the former having only a fraction of sales, revenue, profits, and even projected sales of most of their peers. Much of this is a gold rush/pump-and-dump cycle, where earlier investors expect to profit from later investors.
That being said, I acknowledge your main point that it’s the perception of (future) profits that generally drives stock prices. Tesla is an exception. Most stocks move on more traditional drivers, such as value and growth.
I don’t see how forcing people back to the office will drive profits, though. Office space is expensive. At my employer (pre-COVID), it was over $500 per employee per month. That was the grand total for rent, HVAC, networking, etc. It was second only to salaries in terms of expenses. This is in a city that is regularly featured in the lists of most affordable places to live in the US. Is there some study (esp Gartner, since that’s what the suits blindly follow) that shows higher productivity in office?
AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s a combination of things, really. Global markets and the Internet has changed how firms compete. They no longer compete to have more customers. Thanks to globalization and the Internet, the customer base for any given company is essentially infinite, or at least much bigger than firms need. What’s scarce is investment capital, and equity markets are growing more and more speculative as time goes on. Investors are buying, not on the expected dividends they’ll receive as a share of the profits, but on their ability to flip the stock to sell at a higher price, to another investor who are themselves expecting to flip the stock, there’s absolutely no regards to the fundamentals of the business. It’s like watching a group of house flippers buy all the properties in a neighborhood and flip them a little, then sell them to one another, and the property values just keep going up.
We saw this with D&D Beyond and Wizards of the Coast. A whistleblower from within the company said that the executives see the customers as an “obstacle to their money”. Under that mindset, you don’t have customers to serve, you have assets to monetize, and customers are preventing you from monetizing said assets.