La leva dei prezzi sul profitto aziendale: i drivers della crescita di valore dell’impresa

The price is considered a critical variable because decisions concerning prices affect the level of demand and consequently the business's economic performance. In particular, pricing policy has a significant influence on the firm's economics for three main reasons. 1) The first is that profits are very sensitive to even a small change in prices. This is shown by various empirical research. A 1% variation increase in prices has a much greater impact on profits than a 1% decrease in costs and a 1% increase in volumes. 2) The second reason is that in the contemporary economy most markets, both B-to-C (sales to consumers) and B-to-B (sales to business organizations), tend to be buyer markets, in which buyers can exercise pressure on prices downward. If producers/sellers fail to resist these pressures, or, increasingly difficult fact, unable to push prices upward, forces from the external environment can quickly erode profits. 3) The third reason, but not the least important, is that in many firms, development and thus revenue growth is a primary objective. Development does not always create value. It creates it only if the return on invested capital (ROIC=NOPAT/IC) is higher than the cost of invested capital itself, since the ROIC measures the effectiveness with which the company uses its capital in order to create value for the shareholders and is calculated by means of the ratio between the net profit for the year after taxes (NOPAT), and invested capital (IC), where IC represents the capital that finances the operations of the business. In order to understand the importance of prices in business strategies, it is considered appropriate to review the evolution of economic theories related to prices and remember that the modern enterprise, within the framework of systemic theory, can be considered as a system of transformations (Mella, 2008, 2022). The second part of the article is devoted to analyzing what are the main driver of value creation to be considered in pricing decisions and identifies revenue growth and Return of Capital as key driver.