EXTRAORDINARY ITEMS - More negative profit increments on the way at

Ex Items is old enough to remember a chemical company in the early 1980s that did not talk about losses, but did mention “under-recovering overheads”. Sounds so much better, doesn’t it? Now Guy Tarring, Computron’s effervescent European marketing director, has passed us this nugget for the FD thesaurus. He found a news item on the web saying that Joy Covey, chief financial officer of Amazon.com promised more losses to come. “We’ve been thinking too small,” she said. The time is right, she added, to “build a foundation for a multibillion-dollar company.” Nothing wrong with ambition, but such far-sighted corporate vision comes at a cost: Amazon “will be turning our eyes away from margin enhancements”. Er, that’s good, yeah?