Net income
The bottom-line profit after deducting all charges — operating, financial, and tax — before distribution to shareholders. It is the final line of the income statement and a synthetic measure of the business’s ultimate profitability for the period.
In practice
Net income is the metric most watched by non-specialists but the least useful for managing a growing business: it can be positive with negative cash flow when debtor days are long, or negative with strong cash generation when depreciation is high. An experienced investor reads net income alongside EBITDA, operating cash flow, and working capital to reconstruct the underlying economic reality. Optimising reported net income without regard to actual cash generation is a misleading reporting practice.