Huh? Citation? Delta's profit margin last quarter was 12%, and that's a horrible way to calculate per-ticket profit. When I'm spending $1200 on a ticket to fly 500 miles round trip on a flight that's packed, they're making a LOT more than 12% on that ticket.
Did you actually bother to verify those links? They're wildly inaccurate. It claims Delta is making $50B/quarter??? They make roughly $13B/quarter. Your very first link claims Delta's profit margin 6/20/23 is 5.36% - it was 11.72% per their earnings report. 12/31/22 - claims 2.61%, it was 6.17%. Garbage in, garbage out.
And again, that doesn't address the fact their net profit margin has literally 0 relation to their profit margin on MY TICKET which is CONSIDERABLY higher than 11.72% on average.
And page 63/64, it seems like Macrotrends is using “net income/loss” row and the “total operating income” row, and Google is also using the same, so not sure why the quarterly figures are different. Macrotrends does look erroneous here.
>And again, that doesn't address the fact their net profit margin has literally 0 relation to their profit margin on MY TICKET which is CONSIDERABLY higher than 11.72% on average.
Yes, the delta bosses are not considering the profit margin from your specific flights, but assuming the vast majority of their business is flights where their airline miles come into play, then I figured it is a good assumption that, on average, losing a flight costs them the around the same profit margin.
Of course it is possible they lose so many flights that it cuts into their fixed costs, but I assume they are smart enough to make those calculations.
The allocation of profits down to specific activities depends on the allocation of revenues and expenses amongst activities, and all such allocations are inherently arbitrary. They depend on the stories we tell.
I worked with accounting enough to know that it is unable to provide a proper analytical framework for social or economic problems. Or, as Lenin put it, "For practical work, we need to have figures ... But we will defer the verification of the accuracy of the figures, the estimated percentage errors, etc., to a later period.”
The macrotrends graphs are clearly labeled TTM (trailing twelve months), and seem accurate to me cross-checking just a few Delta measures against published financials.
