I suppose the business courses you took are tech startup oriented. For tech companies until recently, the business is valued at roughly 10x revenue, so revenue

I suppose the business courses you took are tech startup oriented. For tech companies until recently, the business is valued at roughly 10x revenue, so revenue is the all important metric. Profit is not important. This is why the barely profitable Salesforce and the non profit enterprise named Uber is worth so much in the stock market. For traditional businesses, the metrics are profit and in particular profit margin (profit/revenue), so more revenue at same profit is bad. And other metrics like ROCE (Return on Capital Employed) and FCF (Free Cash Flow)... which incentivise lots of debt if you can borrow cheap but discourage capital investment. This is obviously antithesis of tech startups.