Tesco turned over £63.6 billion in 2025, excluding fuel sales, so their small margin is enough. Unless you are turning over huge amounts of money like Tesco, Amazon and the like, small margins won't keep you afloat.
Any big global business will be moving money around, offshoring profits etc and it is impossible to know what their true margin is.
I have worked for / in a number of large global companies, they all have a vast swathe of other companies in the group, many are from aquisitions and mergers, but they never close them down, it must cost money to keep them in use, and the finance systems have all sorts of funny cost codes to allocate purchases / expenses / sales to.
Also profit is worked out after all expenses, so if I ran a business and spent £100k in total on running the business and buying stock, had sales of £250k + VAT, leaving me £150k "profit", but paid myself £100k, gave HMRC their £15k employers NI, stuffed £35k into my company pension I would be running a company that makes zero profit.....
....I wonder how much the SBF directors were paying themselves, putting into pensions, spending on "expenses" for "entertaining", a lot of people have got very rich of going bust, and we see this pattern time and time again.
Motorcycle City, Carnell, George White, SBF, probably a load more I have forgotten about.
The question now is what happens to all of these SBF bikes, I would imagine there are a lot more used bikes in the market than there are buyers right now, with the economy turning to shit and people losing jobs / becoming poorer in real terms....
... I would not be at all surprised if Blade go the same way and we find out they have massive loans and debts, although perhaps having SBF taken out of the equation helps them.
I feel very sorry for all of the people who are now looking for a new job in the current environment.
