Weekly Numerics | Corporate profits surge, yet wages stagnate; snacking woes, and content takedown requests surge

Weekly Numerics is a column that features three to five charts based on major events or interesting data points that emerged during the week. Here are some of the key figures of the past seven days.

Unhealthy snacking

An analysis of 1,901 products from the top 20 FMCG companies in India shows that 76 percent of their revenue came from selling unhealthy food products. The companies jointly have a 36 percent market share, according to a report by Access to Nutrition Initiative, a non-profit organisation.

As much as 55.6 percent of packaged food products from the companies were classified as ‘least healthy,’ with a rating of 1.5 or less out of five.

“The mean healthiness of companies’ products was found to be 1.9 stars out of 5.0 (2.0 when data were weighted by sales), with substantial variation observed between companies,” the non-profit organisation based in The Netherlands, said in its report. “Overall, 12 percent of products were eligible to be marketed to children according to the World Health Organization South-East Asia Region criteria, increasing to 21 percent after sales-weighting was applied.”

A low proportion (17 percent) of the products met the health star rating (HSR) cutoff of 3.5 out of 5.0 stars, increasing to 24 percent when results were weighted by category and company sales. An HSR of 3.5 and above shows that a product is healthy. Between 1.5 and 3.5, the product is considered ‘less healthy,’ and below 1.5 it is classified as ‘least healthy.’

Rise in takedown requests

India sent one of the highest number of content removal requests to Google over the past 10 years, a report by Surfshark showed. From 2013 to 2022, the country sent 19,589 such requests to Google, the third-highest globally.

This means that, on average, the Indian authorities sent more than five content takedown requests to Google per day.

Globally, Russia came out on top for the number of content removal requests sent to Google. Almost two-thirds of all such requests globally were from Russia.

Meanwhile, content removal requests globally rose 50 percent in 2022. Indian requests climbed 26 percent from a year before.

Defamation was the top reason cited by the Indian authorities to justify their content removal requests to Google. More than 20 percent of all such requests sent in the past decade cited defamation as the reason. Globally, most content removal requests were sent in the name of national security.

Corporate profit rises, wages stagnate

Listed Indian companies generated over Rs 3 lakh crore in net profit (profit after tax) in the quarter ended September. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the stated net profit of 4,303 companies that published their financial statements so far added up to Rs 3.05 lakh crore.

Although this is slightly lower than the net profit of Rs 3.14 lakh crore reported by 4,625 companies in the quarter ended June, the September quarter figure is expected to rise further once the remaining companies publish their financial statements. The net profit of listed companies is now almost 5 percent of India’s GDP.

While profit has reached record highs, wages have largely stagnated in recent quarters, the data showed.

Indian companies paid Rs 2.5 lakh crore as wages in the quarter ended December 2022. In the following three quarters, wages have almost stagnated, growing at 4.8 percent, 1.4 percent, and 0.1 percent. Meanwhile, PAT P&E (profit after tax net of prior period and extraordinary transactions) rose 14.7 percent, 7.2 percent, and 2.6 percent during this period.

According to CMIE, the corporate sector is taking an unconventional path to profit, enjoying a somewhat free ride. In the September quarter, profit surged by 39 percent, surpassing the growth in labour costs (9.5 percent) and net fixed assets of non-finance companies (8.2 percent). Remarkably, non-finance companies achieved profit growth despite a 1.5 percent decline in overall revenue for the second consecutive quarter.

The finance sector also thrived without lending to non-finance companies, as banks aggressively provided loans to other finance institutions, which, along with banks, have lent to households.

Limited growth in assets and wages, coupled with reduced access to capital in the September quarter, hindered the corporate sector's revenue growth. Surprisingly, this unconventional scenario simultaneously contributed to the corporate sector achieving record profit.