Scholarly publishers and their high profits

I recently published the below chart to document the outrageous profit margins of scholarly publishers in the sciences.

{.alignleft .size-medium .wp-image-1180 attachment-id="1180" permalink="https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=1180" orig-file="https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-12-35-26-pm.png" orig-size="671,323" comments-opened="1" image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" image-title="Screen Shot 2013-01-09 at 12.35.26 PM" image-description="" image-caption="" medium-file="https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-12-35-26-pm.png?w=300" large-file="https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-12-35-26-pm.png?w=671" srcset="https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-12-35-26-pm.png?w=600 600w, https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-12-35-26-pm.png?w=150 150w, https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-12-35-26-pm.png?w=300 300w, https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screen-shot-2013-01-09-at-12-35-26-pm.png 671w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px"}

This post is to provide the sources for the numbers in the chart.

The Woolworths number comes from their website, where they write "As a group, Woolworths Limited makes less than seven cents in the dollar before we then pay interest and tax".

The Rio Tinto figure of 23% is based on the operating profit they report divided by the consolidated sales revenue in their 2011 financial summary.

Apple's profit of 35% is based on these numbers, dividing their operating income for the year ending September 2012 of 55.2 billion by the revenue for the same period of 156.5 billion.

The 34% number for Springer comes from Heather Morrison's PhD thesis, in which she writes that "Springer's Science + Business Media (2010) reported a return on sales (operating profit) of 33.9% or € 294 million on revenue of € 866 million, an increase of 4% over the profit of the previous year."

For Elsevier, I used the figure reported by investment analyst Claudio Aspesi.

For Wiley, I again used Heather Morrison's analysis in her thesis, based on $99 million in profit on $245 million in revenue.

Thanks to Nick Scott-Samuel and Mike Taylor.