Cost of revenue
Cost of revenue is what it cost to produce and deliver exactly what was sold during the year — materials, factory labour, freight, the servers a software product runs on. It stops before sales, administration, interest and tax.
How it is computed here
| Formula | as reported in the income statement (also filed as 'cost of goods sold' or 'cost of sales') |
|---|---|
| Unit | Currency amount |
| Period | One fiscal year, as reported |
| Source | Extracted from SEC filings; every value on an asset page carries the accounting tag and the filing it came from |
| Identifier | custo |
What goes into the formula
| Cost of revenue, as filed | Read straight from the statement. Where a company reports cost of products and cost of services on separate lines, this is their sum. |
|---|---|
| Nothing else | No allocation is performed here. Where a company does not report the line at all — many banks and insurers do not — the field is left empty rather than reconstructed from revenue minus gross profit, because that reconstruction silently imports whatever the company chose to leave out. |
A formula without its inputs explained is decoration. Where an input is missing from a filing, the metric is left empty here rather than completed with a zero or an estimate.
How to calculate cost of revenue, step by step
Two companies with the same revenue and very different cost structures.
| Both — revenue | $4,000M |
|---|---|
| Software company — cost of revenue | $1,000M |
| Grocer — cost of revenue | $3,200M |
- Software: gross profit = 4,000 − 1,000 = $3,000M.
- Grocer: gross profit = 4,000 − 3,200 = $800M.
- The two businesses billed the same and kept $2,200M more or less of it before a single salesperson was paid.
Result: $1,000M against $3,200M on identical revenue
Cost of revenue is the line that decides how much room a business has for everything else. It is also the one most often drawn in a different place by two companies in the same industry.
The figures in this example are illustrative and rounded — they are not a real company. The real figures on this site are the live ones below and on every asset page, each carrying the filing it came from.
What cost of revenue is good for
It is the only cost line reported close enough to the product to say anything about pricing power. Everything below it — advertising, head office, interest — is a choice about how to run the company; cost of revenue is closer to what the product physically costs.
What this number does not tell you
Where the line is drawn is a presentation choice, not a rule. One company puts distribution inside cost of revenue and its competitor puts it in operating expenses, and their gross margins are then not comparable even though both are correct. Depreciation of the factory may be in here or below, and the filing does not always say which.
Every metric on this site is published with its blind spot stated. A figure without its limit is half a fact.
Highest reported cost of revenue
| WMTWALMART INC. | $535.4B |
|---|---|
| MCKMcKESSON CORPORATION | $388.9B |
| AMZNAMAZON COM INC | $356.4B |
| CORCENCORA, INC. | $309.9B |
| BLSHBullish | $244.7B |
| COSTCOSTCO WHOLESALE CORP /NEW | $239.9B |
| CVSCVS HEALTH Corp | $221.2B |
| AAPLApple Inc. | $221.0B |
From the most recent fiscal year of each company. Only companies reporting in US dollars are ranked here — a figure in yen or won is not larger, it is in another currency.
See it in a published filing
These pages show the figure across up to nineteen fiscal years, with the accounting tag and the filing behind every value.