More cash flow, tho.
More money for R&D.
More money to pay the CEO.
More money and opportunity to get future profits.
Sure your margins is lower, but if anything else is equal and not worse, I do 3x revenue with 1x profits over 1x revenue with 1x profits every time.
But one point stands. It's riskier. So if things don't go well anymore, the first option is a lot harder on the company.
It's quite a theoretical question.
1) No revenue is not "cash flow". Your liabilities can be sky high, and time sensitive, and as a result you can not have enough cash to cover liabilities at a certain point in time despite big revenues that quater.
This is what we actually call "cash flow". Construction firms can take on huge project with huge revenues, but still go bust due to "cash flow" issue.
2) Revenue itself doesn't correlate necessarily to R&D, the amount of "reinvested profit" does though. The company might dedicate a fixed cost to R&D personnel, but that doesn't mean a company will necessarily shift profits away to feed an R&D department. Most companies make big R&D bets from "reinvested profits" aka not revenue.
3) You do not pay CEO off the revenue, not before deducting you liabilities to external parties. I don't know where this is from.
4) Neither is superior to the other in a real busines operation sense, I don't know where this comes from. Nobody can make a blanket statement like this, about whether it is better or worse without considering what is the business model for the company.
Most investors prefer the company with higher profit margin most of the time, and companies exist to make profits, not revenue.
Even companies that get invested on heavily despite heavily losdes (like Amazon Netflix), investors hang on in the hopes of future monopoly-like profits once they win the E-commerce/Stream wars. The moment they stop growing the pain stats (as seen by Netflix's recent issues).
I am seeing a buncha weird statements in this post about what revenue does. The idea that revenue is super important and what people look at in a company, to the exclusion of other factors, is a weird one, I don't even know where it originated from. Certainly not in serious analyst circles, I do hear it alot on 2ch though.