How Do Gross Profit and EBITDA Differ?

Gross profit and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) each show the earnings of a company. However, the two metrics calculate profit in different ways. Investors and analysts may want to look at both profit metrics to gain a better understanding of a company's revenue and how it operates. 

What Is Gross Profit?

Gross profit is the income earned by a company after deducting the direct costs of producing its products or providing its services. It measures how well a company generates profit from their direct labor and direct materials.

Gross profit does not include non-production costs such as costs for the corporate office. Only the revenue and costs of the company's production facility are included in gross profit.

The Formula for Gross Profit

 $\text{Gross Profit}=\text{Revenue}-\text{Cost of Goods Sold}$Gross Profit=Revenue−Cost of Goods Sold

Revenue is the total amount of income earned from sales in a period. Revenue can also be called net sales because discounts and deductions from returned merchandise may have been deducted from it. Revenue is considered the top-line earnings number for a company since it's located at the top of the income statement.

Cost of goods sold (COGS) is the direct costs associated with producing goods. Some of the costs included in gross profit are:

• Direct materials
• Direct labor
• Equipment costs involved in production
• Utilities for the production facility

Example of Gross Profit Calculation

Below is a portion of the income statement for J.C. Penney Company, Inc. (JCP) on May 5, 2018.

• Total revenue was $2.67 billion (highlighted in green).
• COGS was $1.71 billion (highlighted in red).
• Gross profit was $960 million for the period.

As we can see from the example, gross profit does not include operating expenses such as overhead. It also doesn't include interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Because of this, gross profit is effective if an investor wants to analyze the financial performance of revenue from production and management's ability to manage the costs involved in production. However, if the goal is to analyze operating performance while including operating expenses, EBITDA is a better financial metric.

What Is EBITDA?

EBITDA is one indicator of a company's financial performance and is used as a proxy for the earning potential of a business. EBITDA strips out the cost of debt capital and its tax effects by adding back interest and taxes to earnings.

EBITDA also removes depreciation and amortization, a non-cash expense, from earnings. It also helps to show the operating performance of a company before taking into account the capital structure, such as debt financing. 

EBITDA can be used to analyze and compare profitability among companies and industries, as it eliminates the effects of financing and accounting decisions.

The Formula for EBITDA

 $\begin{aligned} &\text{EBITDA}=\text{OI} + \text{Depreciation} + \text{Amortization}\\ &\textbf{where:}\\ &\text{OI}=\text{Operating Income} \end{aligned}$​EBITDA=OI+Depreciation+Amortizationwhere:​

Operating income is a company's profit after subtracting operating expenses or the costs of running the daily business. Operating income helps investors separate out the earnings for the company's operating performance by excluding interest and taxes.

Example of EBITDA Calculation

Let's use the same income statement from the gross profit example for J.C. Penney above:

• Operating income was $3 million.
• Depreciation was $141 million, but the $3 million in operating income includes subtracting the $141 million in depreciation. As a result, depreciation and amortization need to be added back into the operating income number during the EBITDA calculation.
• EBITDA was $144 million for the period ($141 million + $3 million).

We can see that interest expenses and taxes are not included in operating income but instead are included in net income or the bottom line.

Special Considerations

The above examples show that the EBITDA figure of $144 million was quite different from the $960 million gross profit figure during the same period.

One metric is not better than the other. Instead, they both show the profit of the company in different ways by stripping out different items. Operating expenses are removed with gross profit. Non-cash items like depreciation, as well as taxes and the capital structure or financing, are stripped out with EBITDA.

EBITDA helps to strip out management decisions or possible manipulation by removing debt financing, for example, while gross profit can help analyze the production efficiency of a retailer that might have a lot of cost of goods sold, as in the case of J.C. Penney.

Since depreciation is not captured in EBITDA, it has some drawbacks when analyzing a company with a significant amount of fixed assets. For example, an oil company might have large investments in property, plant, and equipment. As a result, the depreciation expense would be quite large, and with depreciation expenses removed, the earnings of the company would be inflated.