It's hard to see much to celebrate in Sainsbury's numbers First-half sales excluding VAT are up 4pc to £12bn, a £467m improvement. Like-for-like sales, from stores open at least a year, are up 1.7pc adding £196m to the top line. This rate of growth outstrips Tesco, which, in the UK, recently announced half-year sales excluding VAT of £21.4bn and like-for-likes of -0.6pc. So plenty to look pleased about for Sainsbury's. Moving further through the numbers, Sainsbury's sales translate into an underlying operating profit of £412m and a profit margin of 3.4pc. In the UK, Tesco reported profits of £1.1bn and a margin of 5.15pc, despite its well publicised troubles. Tesco shareholders own a company that may look uglier than Sainsbury's at the moment but is possibly thinking a bit straighter when it comes to the bottom line. If it fixes its problems then those sales will recover and its profitability rise further. At a margin as skinny as 3.4pc, many companies would get turned away for more credit at the bank. Delve down to Sainsbury's profit before tax and it comes in at £405m compared with £395m last year. So £467m of additional sales has generated £10m of additional profit. This is starting to look a more serious case for the psychiatrist's couch. Going a bit further and probing the subconscious world of cash flows, it's interesting to note how Sainsbury's operates here, too. A £637m cash position generated from operations minus items such as tax, investments and dividends leaves a negative cash flow of £190m to be funded out of borrowings. Much of this analysis probably appeals to the more orthodox school of corporate psychiatry where pre-tax profits and cash flows (preferably positive) are the primary signs of corporate health. Sales activity, like brain activity, is relevant but what's important is the profitability (or sanity) of that activity. And any retail veteran (such as Kate Swann at WH Smith) will tell you that even falling sales are not necessarily a barrier to rising profits. Anyway, much of modern analysis prefers to look at Ebitdar - operating profit before costs such as interest, tax, depreciation of assets and amortisation of goodwill and, in the case of retailers, rent. This figure translates old fashioned operating profit at Sainsbury from £412m to Ebitdar of £930m, or a rather healthier margin of 7.65pc. So good news? Well, if you consider how one leading expert on Wednesday described Vodafone's first-half ebitda (no "r" as there's no rent as such) as having "disappointed" despite an ebitda margin of 30.5pc it's hard to see how there's that much to celebrate in Sainsbury's numbers. And when the grocer's shareholders consider Vodafone's actual first-half ebitda number was £6.6bn, £200m higher than Sainsbury's entire market value, it's impossible to know whether to laugh or cry.