And they said I’d never amount to anything

I’m interviewing a pair of companies this morning for an article in my September issue. Their combined 2005 revenues were $126 billion.

One’s a major drug company, the other a major healthcare distributor. Margins are a funny thing: the drug company had around $52 billion in sales, with a cost-of-goods of $8.5 billion, while the distributor had $74 billion in sales, with a cost-of-goods of $70 billion. On the other hand, the drug company’s selling, general, and administrative costs were $17 billion while the distributor’s SGA costs were $2.8 billion.

Reminds me of those differences in R&D costs from a few posts back.