👉 Background: Woolworths is Australia's biggest and baddest grocery giant. And this year, they've grown even bigger with their acquisition of MilkRun, the grocery delivery service.

👉 What happened: Now, Woolies has announced a full-year profit of $1.6 billion in their annual report, which is a 4.6% increase from last financial year. This was less than what investors were expecting, but they weren't too disappointed about it because:

• Woolies hiked up their dividends for investors
• Woolies improved their profit margins by about 2% (despite inflation).

👉 What else: While investors might be happy with their returns, others are a little suss that it's come at the cost of customers.

What's the key learning?

💡There's a new buzzword in town, and it's called 'greed-flation'. The idea behind it is that major companies are taking advantage of "inflation" to increase their costs more than what's needed to maintain their margins.

💡 And Woolies is the latest in line to be accused of greed-flation. For example, prices of some grocery staples have increased by ~9.6% while inflation's been around 7%.

💡Other than Woolies, we've also seen Qantas, NAB, CommBank, Origin Energy, and Telstra report strong profits so far this year. So are major Aussie companies taking advantage of the 'inflation' excuse and leaving customers to bear the costs? And does this exacerbate inflation even more?

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