Читать книгу Corporate Finance For Dummies - Michael Taillard - Страница 118

The last part of the gross profit portion of the income statement is the gross margin, which you get by subtracting the cost of goods sold from the net sales. The gross margin is all the money a company has left over from its primary operations to pay for overhead and indirect costs, like the sales staff, building rent, janitorial services, and everything else that’s not directly related to the production or purchase of inventory.

When you divide gross margin by net sales, you get the percentage of net sales that isn’t spent on producing the inventory. This percentage is extremely important in evaluating a company’s ability to fund supporting operations, plan growth, and create budgets. The gross margin, sometimes called just margin, also comes into play in a number of metrics that I describe in Chapters 7 and 8.