Wann ist ein Unternehmen profitabel?

This paper analyses how the profitability of public companies in the Federal Republic of Germany has been measured since the 1950s and under which conditions corporations were considered successful. For this purpose, textbooks and arguments of leading business economists, speeches and publications of managing directors and companies’ annual reports are surveyed, in order to identify trends and policy changes. The paper demonstrates that the introduction of shareholder value approaches, based on financial market data, in the 1990s led to a fundamental change in management practices, connected to innovative financial accounting techniques. Since then, companies’ profitability has been assessed in relation to benchmarks derived from financial market data. Financial markets thus became increasingly relevant for decisionmaking processes in the real economy.