- So let's look at an actual income statement.
This is the income statement for Walmart
for the year end of January 31st, 2018.
Remember that an income statement covers a period of time.
This is an income statement for
a one-year, or 12-month period.
Well, what do we look at in the
income statement when we see one?
First, we look at two numbers, the top one, sales,
and the bottom one, net income.
The top number here, sales, is the total amount
that Walmart sold to you and me and other people
around the world during the year, 495 billion dollars.
By the way, that's the world record.
No company in the history of the Earth
has ever sold more than that in one year.
So that's Walmart's sales, 495 billion dollars.
Notice that Walmart has another way
to generate assets and doing business.
The 4.582 billion dollars in other revenue?
That's primarily Sam's Club memberships.
Walmart's total revenue of 500 billion dollars
represents the total amount of assets generated
by Walmart in doing business during the year.
By the way, for those who care about records and thresholds,
this represents the first time in human history
that a public company's had total revenue,
in one year, of over half a trillion dollars.
Now, take a quick look down at the
bottom of Walmart's income statement.
The bottom number here is called
consolidated net income attributable to Walmart.
We've called this just net income.
The number is 9.862 billion.
That's the bottom line.
You've heard of the bottom line?
Well, that's where the phrase bottom line comes from.
By the way, you can sense that there's
additional interesting stuff to learn here.
For example, what does it mean when it says consolidated?
And what kind of net income reported in Walmart's
income statement would not be attributable to Walmart?
These are questions that you can explore
through a more detailed course in accounting,
but they are beyond the scope of our introduction here.
The top line is sales.
The bottom line is net income.
Net income is a measure of economic performance
for Walmart for the year end of January 31st, 2018.
A good way to interpret that number
is that Walmart generated economic value
of 9.862 billion dollars during the year.