profitable

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Profits & losses
anti-profiteering
anti-speculative
be a licence to print moneyidiom
buoyancy
buoyant
cash cow
deficit
lose
lose your shirtidiom
margin
muck
non-profit-making
out-of-pocket
pi
pocket
profit from something
profit warning
rake-off
trade surplus
winnings

unprofitable | American Dictionary

unprofitable
adjective
us/ʌnˈprɑf·ɪ·t̬ə·bəl/
not resulting in profit:
unprofitable investments/businesses

unprofitable | Business English

unprofitable
adjective
 FINANCE, COMMERCEuk /ʌnˈprɒfɪtəbl̩/ us /-ˈprɑːfɪə-/
not making a profit:
an unprofitable business/company/storeWhen the Asian financial crisis hit, it shut 32 unprofitable businesses.
unprofitable markets/operations/products
unprofitable customers/passengersIt promises $80m of savings and that means shedding unprofitable customers.

unprofitably

adverb
The insurance company had been trading unprofitably.

Examples of unprofitable

unprofitable
Its function is to induce individuals to disengage, without conscious intention, from unprofitable situations.
Since abilityto-pay is low in poor nations, tying the innovator's compensation to benchmark year sales results in low powered incentives for work on 'unprofitable' diseases.
The equal division of property, especially land, results in what are often small, unprofitable shares that are then quickly sold, leaving little lasting benefit.
My preliminary remarks on "so-called incorporation" explain why the problem of the boundaries of law is an unprofitable focus for a jurisprudential discussion.
Becoming a skilled laborer was often seen as an alternative to unprofitable and socially disagreeable agricultural work or menial labor.
However, so heavy was the take of walrus during the next 3-4 years that stocks were quickly depleted and the area became unprofitable.
To sustain profitability, corporations employ strategies of "demarketing," namely, concerted efforts to drive away unprofitable patients and deemphasize unprofitable services.
Some fields of copper and nickel were found, but most were unprofitable because of the small water volume of local rivers.
At such a price, it would be unprofitable for publishers to produce three-volume novels, if such products were intended for sale to individual readers.
A 50 % fall in onion price makes the control and fully fertilized treatments unprofitable and reduces net incomes by over 70 % in the other treatments.
Meanwhile, channelling money into urban activities in which the indigenous community has limited experience and few connections, may be risky and unprofitable.
The former land use is unprofitable, whereas the yields of the latter vary considerably.
Extra investments in, for instance, housing were stimulated, unprofitable industries were supported and employment in the (semi-) government sector extended.
For this equilibrium to exist the public must make every deviation from this equilibrium inflation target unprofitable by expecting high inflation.
Hence, her emphasis on "intense determination to succeed" suggests that she decided to write what would sell, rather than produce unprofitable, progressive novels.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.