I couldn't tell if that was sarcasm, sorry!Boombastix wrote: ↑08 Oct 2018Net. But they had a strike of loss years before that. Looks like VST brought back profits.
But in all seriousness, it's hard to parse those results as publicly available. (The last bit is important as we've no idea how reliable that site is, but as I pointed out some years ago back on PUF, certain things it shows are obvious and true, like my predicted massive Record write-offs when PH had to move everyone to Reason 6 effectively for free.)
As you note, they had a strike of "losses" or barely break evens for several years before and after "peak RE" in 2014.
Context is everything, and mostly it's sorely lacking so it's nigh impossible for outsiders like us to draw many firm conclusions here, so most of this is probably total bollocks. But one thing is very clear: that $2.5m profit for 2017 makes little sense if you think about it at all, as the published turnover is around $2m down on 2016, despite the "biggest Reason update ever!".
A reported $12m turnover with a small loss somehow becomes a ~25% turnover reduction and yet achieves a ~25% net profit? I can see the expression on Meadon and Jones's faces now. If you're making a loss at $12m, that's some feat—or trick—to suddenly go and make a 25% profit with a 25% lower turnover.
Still, there's a ton of entirely legal reasons it could be the case, but a sudden user splurge on VSTs and RE ain't any of them. I'd be surprised if Reason upgrades accounted for the sudden rise in profit too, or else the profit would be (somewhat) comparable in previous upgrade years because, again, the turnover is comparable; Fruity Loops and Cubase and Ableton users didn't suddenly rush out and buy Reason 9/10 last year because of VST support, Europa, and some over-loudnessmaxed loops, so that turnover income still has to be accounted for as mostly from existing users upgrading (but that doesn't entirely square with two bits of other info I have I can't share).
So it's most likely some form of standard accounting workaround I can't pretend to understand to either make 2017 look good for the new investors, deferring tax on profits for a year for business capital reasons (i.e., $2.5m could be the combined profits of 2016 and 2017), or, another Reason user suggested to me recently, a method to defer taxes on shares from 2016 into 2017, which sounds clever enough to be eminently credible.