Purpose
These financial metrics measure levels and rates of profitability. How does a company decide whether it is successful or not? Probably the most common way is to look at the net profits of the business. Given that companies are collections of projects and markets, individual areas can be judged on how successful they are at adding to the corporate net profit. Not all projects are of equal size, however, and one way to adjust for size is to divide the profit by sales revenue. The resulting ratio is return on sales (ROS), the percentage of sales revenue that gets 'returned' to the company as net profits after all the related costs of the activity are deducted.
Read more about this topic: Operating Margin
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—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)