Harvard Business Review

JUNE 20, 2012

Instead, companies seeking to improve the lives of the world's poor should focus on a more realistic route to profitability: They need to elevate gross margins far above the company average by pushing down variable costs and boosting the price consumers are willing to pay for a unit of product.

Variable Costs 15

Variable Costs Banking Sales Sales 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 8, 2012

Cloud service providers are increasingly proxies for utilities — they require 100% uptime, significant quantities of their own power, and predictable variable cost (which for renewables is nearly zero). Sales/Becoming the Vendor of Choice. Even so, they will collect north of $10 million, which is enough to buy offsets.

Energy 17

Energy Variable Costs Travel Operations 17

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 5, 2014

The logic, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) and banks like HSBC, is this: as the world migrates away from carbon-based fuels, trillions of barrels of oil and billions of tons of coal — the assets sitting on the books of energy companies — will become “stranded,” or worthless.

Assets 14

Assets Energy Variable Costs Government 14

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 4, 2013

For example, a decade ago, it''s unlikely that small-business owners would have told you that they needed a flexible way to host data and applications, one that preferably turned the fixed cost of computer hardware into a variable cost of renting capacity.

Fixed Costs 8

Fixed Costs Variable Costs Assets Banking 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 3, 2018

In a follow up HBR article , we interviewed several chief financial officers (CFOs) of leading technology companies and senior analysts of investment banks and distilled seven key insights from those discussions. For example, Twitter provides “cost per ad engagement.”

Variable Costs 8

Variable Costs Revenue Assets Accounts 8