I’m no accountant but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like “We’ve remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before.”?

no, because profitability isn’t the key figure they are interested in. it’s growth. i recently got fired because of disappointing growth; e.g. the increase in profitability was not as large as they expected. which means they still made more money than last year.

this is why expenditures get relegated to “externality” status; because otherwise projections would make it look like a company can not grow infinitely large, and surely that’s not true