Exxon Profit, Oh MY!!!!

Preface:
I'm a little more skeptical of media reports than the average guy (I think). I write these blogs for two reasons. The first is to get my thoughts down and somewhat organized. The second, is I'm doing some research, and passing that on to my friends. Hopefully, if any of you don't have time to research these things, you'll find some use in my research.
Post:
I had a conversation the other day with an acquaintance at work regarding oil prices. It came up that Exxon is having record profits. It seems to be a big topic lately, because people are irate about the price of gas, and are looking for the bad guy in the situation. Just today, CNN (and Fortune) had a very misleading article on the highest profits made by companies in 2007. I say "misleading" for two reasons.
Misleading Headlines/Tag lines
First, CNN's tag line read "Exxon Mobil again tops Fortune's list of top earners. Which other companies are among the most profitable on the planet?" I clicked on it to read, and find out the Exxon is actually number 2... I guess top is a relative term.
Profit is not the same as Profit Margin
The second reason I find the article misleading, along with almost media sources is that they report straight profit, without taking into account the revenue of the company. A more equitable tool of comparison is profit margin, which relates the margin to the total revenue of the company. For instance, if I own a company, and I make $100 profit, and my friend owns a company and makes a profit of $200, and that's all anybody ever looked at, you would say my friend is doing better (and liberals would say he should have his profit taxed!). However, if we reported that my company had a revenue of $1000 and my friend's company had revenue of $4000, we get the full picture. For every dollar of product I sold, I made $.10 profit. For every dollar or product my friend sold, he made $.05 profit. (He still made more money than me, because either I was too lazy, or too dumb to market to the right people!) Thus, you see that you must compare profit margins, and not just profit.
Actual Winners
I did some digging to find out if Exxon's profit margin was out of line. What I found on Fortune's website was interesting. Fortune lists the "Fortune 1000" companies, along with their revenue and their profit. What follows are the facts. The company with the highest profit margin on their list is "Mirant" an electric energy company with a profit margin of 70.87%. You would have to scan down the list all the way to #219 to find Exxon, with a measly profit margin of 10.89%. There are 218 companies on Fortune's 1000 list that have a better profit margin than any major oil and gas company!!! Here's a list of companies that most of us are familiar with that have better profit margins that Exxon:

• Microsoft (27.51%)
• Google (25.33%)
• Qwest (21.17%)
• Coca-Cola (20.73%)
• Johnson & Johnson (17.31%)
• Northwest Airlines (16.71%) How can an airline complain about gas prices when they're making a higher profit than the gas company?
• Harley Davidson (15.20%)
• McGraw-Hill (14.97%) We all knew that we were getting robbed on our text books!
• St. Jude Medical (14.79%) This one really pisses me off... I did a "Math-a-thon" for them when I was in elementary school to help them raise money to save kids... Turns out, they're making a profit!
• Apple (14.56%)
• PepsiCo (14.33%)
• Walt Disney (13.06%)
• Abercrombie & Fitch (12.69%) This is just further evidence of the lack of intelligence of all the sheep who buy their entire wardrobe here! They are actually fleecing you!
• Anheuser-Busch (12.68%)
• Allstate (12.61%)

I think the main point here is that the oil and gas companies are not really the monsters that the media is painting them to be. With this knowledge, I feel that any liberal push to tax the profits of the oil and gas companies (a bad idea to begin with) should apply to every other company that does business in this country and makes huge profit. It would never happen... oil and gas are the "bad guys"...

Orion Program

I'm too lazy to blog... I've thought of several things that I wanted to blog about in the last week or so, but I'm too lazy to leave my remote control and come type. Typing is hard!!!! I'm just kidding. But, this is why I've changed the title of my blog to "The Lazy Blogger".


Anyway, I wanted to blog about my work, because I think it's interesting stuff. For those of you who don't know yet, I've worked for Lockheed Martin for almost 6 years now, with the last 1.5 being in Denver working on the "Orion" program (also called Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV).


Orion is NASA's intended space travel system that will replace the space shuttle and allow us to return astronauts to the moon. The program has even loftier goals of eventually facilitating travel to Mars... that's a ways down the road.


To be fair, Orion is just a portion of a much bigger NASA program called "Constellation". Constellation consists of launch vehicles (rockets) calles Ares, Orion, and a Lunar Lander.


Orion consists of a "Service Module" (SM), a "Crew Module" (CM) and a "Launch Abort System" (LAS). You can read more about Constellation here, and about Orion here. You'll also find links to the Lunar Lander and other interesting stuff...


I play two roles on the Orion Program that are very much related. First, I lead the Transportation and Handling Equipment Design Team. Second, I lead the Ground Test Article Mechanical Ground Support Equipment (MGSE) Design Team. Both fall under the larger umbrella of MGSE Design. One distinction that I have on the program (which I have to admit I'm rather proud of) is that I designed the very first piece of hardware formally delivered to NASA for this program. It wasn't anything fancy, but it was first!! You can see pictures of my first Orion Delivery here.
In this picture, you're looking at a test article CM for our very first "abort flight test". I designed only the part on the top that is yellow, which as I mentioned before, isn't really that impressive, but since it was the first delivery, it gives me a sense of pride.








Anyway, I really like my job, and it's an exciting program. One day, it's likely you'll be watching tv, and see things that either I or one of my team members has designed. I know I haven't done the project justice in my description, but check out the NASA links above. On the Orion link, there are all sorts of other links to things that are going on in the program. Good stuff...