> the bottom 7 lowest-margin industries ... (CRISPR, gene therapy, hydrogen fuel cell, genomics and mRNA therapeutics) arguably have some of the greatest potential to improve quality of life and help the planet.

Critically, all the revenue for things you mention have yet to materialize, so they will show up in this naive analysis as losers. What they really represent is _opportunity_. Some may materialize but others have been around for decades and it turns out the "application for profit" step is much harder than anticipated.

> margin (profit) is inversely correlated with value to humanity.

You say this like it's a bad thing, but arguably the most valuable things to humanity are food, water, and shelter. These are simultaneously so important and so cheap that they embody the term "commodity," and that's a good thing! A _ton_ of human ingenuity from every society and culture has been applied to making these things better and cheaper and more plentiful. The same thing is happening to solar power (mostly for geopolitical reasons), which is conspicuously not on either of your lists.

Shelter is the one bit in the hierarchy of needs that got weird. Since it's not a consumable, there's incentive to treat it as an investment. In theory there's nothing wrong with that, but the incentives combined with local politics can become toxic. So many voters in the US own real estate (with leverage!) that everyone agrees by default that prices must never go down. That leads to a trap where politics revolve around housing prices never falling.

I also feel similarly when I was finishing grad school.

I learned advanced engineering topics only to find that the “hot” areas were social media and cell phones.

Not sure what, but always assumed there would be better uses of such an education.

I was largely mistaken.

All of the money is mostly tied up in safe bets for boomers. You don't see capital chasing big bets because folks would rather get their 4-7%+ "guaranteed" than risk it on a startup.

There's probably some meta commentary on the global risk climate in general since COVID here.

Do you mind sharing a link of your linking for (a)? Thank you

Many lenses. I do like the authors focus on one. But you’re right it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Op margins are a great way to think about where one might see mean reversion, which then flows to net.

Ie are there structural reasons for the op income or is it a maturing sector which will attract new entrants.

It skews the other way just as often in my experience. That large clump at 10% has some wildly profitable businesses in it.

> organic marketing etc but then you are just trading time for dollars.

But the alternative, trading dollars for dollars, is essentially just arbitrage, which tends to disappear from competition. Organic marketing is the only sustainable source of alpha I’ve found in affiliate marketing.

Shouldn't you include the ad costs in your margin calculation?

right click -> inspect

HTML looks pretty handwritten (lack of crazy css classes and simple structure)

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fi-le.net/css/tufte.css">

They are using tufte.css https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/

Thank you! As the other commenters already figured out, I manually write HTML and use tufte.css with some minor customizations.

Part of it is this tufte.css: https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/

There is another aspect to this, "Can the margins scale?"

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-11-13/bla...

Thank you for the kind words.

++1

Income is closer to profit than you're thinking.

There is gross income, which is roughly sales (revenue) minus the direct costs of those sales. There is net income, which is the money left over after also accounting for other costs, like fixed overheads and marketing.

Despite my career in accountancy,including at global companies, and despite the definitions in all the comments below that disagree with you, I have never heard anyone in the real world describe Operating Profit as income. I have heard small business owners describe revenue as income. I agree with you, income was a terrible choice of word for this article.

Revenue is what you sell your product for.

Income is what you sit with after all the expenses and taxes have been deducted from the retail price.

Let's say you create some product, XYZ, which takes you exactly 5 hours to make. The materials to make the product costs you $50, the salary costs $100 ($20/hr * 5 hours), the shop costs (rent, utilities, etc.) costs roughly $5 pr product. And the things involved in selling your product (marketing, etc.) costs you $45 pr. product.

So in order to break even, you need to charge $50 + $100 + $5 + $45 = $200

You decide to sell the product for $250.

So before taxes you've earned $250 - $200 = $50

And let's say you have to pay 10% taxes on that, so 10% off $50 = $5

Your shop is left with $45 for each product they sell. Or you have $45 in income.

Your operating margins would be $45 / $250 = 18%

Some terms as defined in an accounting course I took once (U.S. based).

Revenue = The total value of goods or services a company sells during a particular accounting period.

Gross Margin = The difference between revenue and the cost of goods sold. Also called Gross Profit.

Net Income = A corporation’s net earnings or “bottom line.” Net income is the residual of revenues after cost of goods sold, operating expenses, depreciation, interest, and taxes are considered.

Operating Expense = Expenses incurred in conducting normal business operations. Operating expenses may include wages and salaries, employee benefits, administrative expenses, research and development costs, and other similar expenses.