What About Profitability?
What our numbers can not show is profitability. Because most of the Top 100 are privately held, they do not report their profits to the public. About the only thing we can do is take a large, diversified publicly held company and project some results.
Ennis Business Forms had a good second quarter, generating 12.8 percent, or $7.5 million in net profit on sales of $58.7 million. Ennis had similar results a year ago. If we project that profit margin across the Top 100's $4.96 billion in sales, the net profit would be $635 million. Although that number seems high, it should at least provide a reasonable estimate. In contrast, Moore had sales of $532.5 million for its second quarter and showed a normalized loss of $5 million and an actual loss (including restructuring and other charges) of $60.4 million. Hopefully most of the Top 100 Manufacturers fall closer to Ennis than Moore in terms of profits.