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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mani1 who wrote (228518)	4/9/2005 9:12:24 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577095

>>>> If you look at the bottom line you will see oil company's are greatly benefiting. Look at their earnings, stock price etc. Comon David, this is obvious. I am not saying that it means they are doing something necessarily wrong. I make no argument concerning net profits -- they're up. I simply have no problem with it. The markets take care of it. Period, end of story. It is a fact that real dollar profit margins are up, but in XOM's case, their SG&A for '04 was LESS than SG&A for '02, even though sales were up. This isn't all about price gouging as some here suggest. If prices get high enough, there will be competition. There will be more hybrids. Whatever. Those profits will fluctuate over time, but you can't run out an sieze oil company profits every time they have a couple of profitable years unless you want to give it back when they don't. You can't just screw around with the markets like this. As to profit margins, I'm a CPA, but I haven't the slightest idea what inventory accounting implications are for these companies -- and I'd wager neither you nor the others on this board do, either. I know they're on LIFO, and to the extent they're using that inventory, profit margins are inflated by these crude price increases.