👉 Background: AGL energy is Australia’s largest power company with around 4.5 million residential and commercial customers. And it's also the biggest carbon emitter in Australia by the by.

👉 What happened: AGL has had a real rough year.

• It's proposed demerger was successfully derailed by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes
• Some of its biggest coal plants have shut down due to technical issues
• It has seen enormous wholesale energy price volatility

👉 What else: Despite all of this, AGL announced a bottom line profit of $860 million. But the devil is in the detail because underlying profit was just $225 million, down from $537 million last year.

What's the key learning?

💡 When it comes to company financials, there’s often more than one way of framing the figures. Bottom line profit - aka net profit - is the number you’ll find riiight down the bottom of a company’s income statement.

💡 The bottom line profit will include everything including any ‘one-off’ gains, depreciation, tax, amortisation.. etc.

💡 But underlying profit can often give a better idea of how a company’s actually performing because it reflects how much money the company actually generated (excluding one-off costs). And on this occasion, the market seems to agree as AGL's shares sank 4.8% thanks to its weak underlying profit.