How do I interpret these income tax numbers for Chinese public company Dangdang Inc. (DANG)?
"It was not taxed in the previous years because it wasn't in profit. The amount for 2010 is more due to accounting treatment, on account of ""Deferred Domestic Income Tax"". The figures are at http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/DANG/tab/7.2 You can search for a better understanding of Deferred Domestic Income Tax, a brief explanation is at http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deferredincometax.asp"
Lets just get to the point...Ordinary income (gains) earned from S-Corp operations (i.e. income earned after all expenses for providing services or selling products) is passed through to the owners/shareholders and taxed at the owner's personal tax rate. Separately, if an S-Corp earns capital gains (i.e. the S-Corp buys and sells stock, earns dividends from investments, etc), those gains are passed through to the owners and taxed at a capital gains rate Capital gains are not the same as ordinary income (gains). Don't get the two confused, they are as different for S-Corp taxation as they are for personal taxation. In some cases an exception occurs, but only when the S-Corp was formally a C-Corp and the C-Corp had non-distributed earnings or losses. This is a separate issue whereas the undistributed C-Corp gains/losses are treated differently than the S-Corp gains/losses. It takes years of college coursework and work experience to grasp the vast arena of tax. It should not be so complex, but it is this complex. It is not within the scope of the non-tax professional to make sense of this stuff. The CPA exams, although very difficult and thorough, only scrape the surface of tax and accounting. I hope this provides some perspective on any questions regarding business tax for S-Corps and any other entity type. Hire a good CPA... if you can find one. "Yes - this is exactly what it means.  No losses (negative earnings).   With today's accounting methods, you might want to determine whether you view earnings including or excluding extraordinary items.   For example, a company might take a once-off charge to its earnings when revising the value of a major asset.  This would show in the ""including"" but not in the ""excluding"" figure.   The book actually has a nice discussion in Chapter 12 ""Things to Consider About Per-Share Earnings"" which considers several additional variables to consider here too. Note that this earnings metric is different from ""Stock Selection for the Defensive Investor"" which requires 10 years. PS - My edition (4th edition hardback) doesn't have 386 pages so your reference isn't correct for that edition.  I found it on page 209 in Chapter 15 ""Stock Selection for the Enterprising Investor""." "You are not interpreting the table correctly. The $20K ""base rate"" that you think should have been eliminated is in fact the total tax for the whole bracket. You only dipped partially into the bracket, and the $3K reduction accounts for that. Look at the table again: What it means is that if you earn $100K, you will pay $6897.50 + 25% of (100000-50400) = $12400. If you earn $140000, you'll pay $26835 + (140000-130150) * 0.28 = $2758. So why the difference between $26835 and $6897.50? That's exactly 25% of $79500, which is the difference between $130150 and $50400 - the whole value of the bracket." Every country has its own tax code.  Consult a professional in each country regarding income earned in that country. Anything else is speculation. Unless you started a bank or other kind of a financial institution (brokerage, merchant processor, etc etc), the page you linked to is irrelevant. That said, there's enough in the US tax code for you to reconsider your decision of not living in the US, or at least of being a shareholder of a foreign company. Your compliance costs are going to go through the roof. If you haven't broken any US tax laws yet (which is very unlikely), you may renounce your citizenship and save yourself a lot of money and trouble. But in the more likely case of you already being a criminal with regards the US tax law, you should probably get a proper tax advice from a US-licensed CPA/EA who's also proficient in the Japanese-American tax treaty and expats' compliance issues resolution. It is a publicly traded company.  My interest is more in their motivation for  instituting the new policy.  *I* expect the stock to go up, I'm not being told that by someone else.  Thanks for looking out though :) "In the Income Statement that you've linked to, look for the line labeled ""Net Income"". That's followed by a line labeled ""Preferred Dividends"", which is followed by ""Income Available to Common Excl. Extra Items"" and ""Income Available to Common Incl. Extra Items"". Those last two are the ones to look at. The key is that these lines reflect income minus dividends paid to preferred stockholders (of which there are none here), and that's income that's available to ordinary shareholders, i.e., ""earnings for the common stock""." The original post's $16 has two errors: Here is the first scenario: .                                                 Tax Liability($) on   Net .                        Cash    # of     Price    Paper     Realized   Value Time:                     ($)    Shares   ($/sh)   Profits    Profits    ($) 1. Start with:            100        -      n/a         -          -      100 2. After buy  10@10$/sh:    -       10       10         -          -      100 3. Before selling:          -       10       12        (5)         -      115 4. After sell 10@12$/sh:  120        -      n/a         -         (5)     115 5. After buy  12@10$/sh:    -       12       10         -         (5)     115 6. Before selling:          -       12       12        (6)        (5)     133 7. After sell 12@12$/sh:  144        -      n/a         -        (11)     133 8. After buy  14@10$/sh:    4       14       10         -        (11)     133 9. Before selling:          4       14       12        (7)       (11)     154 10.After sell 14@12$/sh:  172        -      n/a         -        (18)     154  At this point, assuming that all of the transactions occurred in the same fiscal year, and the realized profits were subject to a 25% short-term capital gains tax, you would owe $18 in taxes.  Yes, this is 25% of $172 - $100. I have not looked in details but apparently the company has (at least) a dual listing in Hong Kong (its main listing, ticker 700) and in the US (ticker TCTZF). It also has an ADR (TCEHY), the underlying of which is the HK line. The two US listings essentially trade at the same price and will provide very similar returns but a major difference is that TCTZF pays dividends in HKD whereas TCEHY pays its dividends in USD. The latter may be more convenient depending on the account you use to trade the stock. The ADR line is also more liquid. "Ok, I actually went and looked at the income statements for GE. They did not get a refund. They did not get a check from the government for the refund. This all took place between the balance sheet and the income statement. It goes down like this:  GE has on their books ""Deferred Tax Asset"" for XX billion dollars. This came from a year when they had an operating loss. They are carrying this loss forward as a deduction on their taxes (that's what makes it an asset, it's an asset to the company as it decreases their taxes).  For years, they've been reducing that Deferred Tax Asset account, and adding that amount to their ""Income After Tax"" amount. At the end of 2009, the amount they reduced that Deferred Tax Asset account by just so happened to be larger than the amount they decreased their income by due to taxable income that year.  For reference, their end of fiscal year 2009 pre-tax income is $9.864B, and their post tax income is $11.006B.  No one wrote them a check for the difference. It all comes from their own books.  If anyone else wants to look at the actual data and draw their own conclusions: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AGE&amp;fstype=ii&amp;ei=QSxpUNi4Kc3LiQKOZw On that page, click ""Annual Data""." "I was told by the lawyers there was no tax consequence because the two   numbers were the same. That is correct. However, a tax professional tells me that since the start-up stock was   ""realized"" there invokes a taxable event now. That is correct. I'm now led to believe I owe cap-gains tax on the entire 4 year vest   this year That is incorrect. You owe capital gains tax on the sale of your startup stock. Which is accidentally the exact same amount you ""paid"" for the new unvested stocks. There's no taxable event with regards to the new stocks because the amount you paid for them was the amount you got for the old stocks. But you did sell the old stocks, and that is a taxable event." You first compute your Ordinary Income (which includes Dividends, since they are taxed as OI), then you apply the standard tax bracket function to it, which is a piecewise linear function f() such that TAX = f(INCOME). It can be found at About.com. You can transform this into NET_INCOME = g(INCOME) = INCOME - TAX = INCOME - f(INCOME). Presumably g() is what you want to graph. I've actually graphed it before:  Not too interesting, even on a LogLog scale. More interesting is the marginal tax rate, which is the derivative of f(), or the negative of the derivative of g():  ST (straight tax) shows what the marginal tax rate would look like if f() was just f(x)=kx or f(x)=kx+c, i.e. a straight/flat tax. The net tax rate (f(x)/x) actually gets more interesting if you also include [federal subsidies/deductions](Src: http://fbheron.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/fedassistance_ft.jpg) as a negative tax:  Capital Gains are taxed separately and have (almost) nothing to do with this function. Corporate tax is not payed by you (although the burden of the tax [technical term] may fall upon you). Sorry I couldn't simplify; taxes are just complicated. To me this sounds like a transaction, where E already owns a company worth 400k and can therefore pocket the money from D and give D 25% of the profits every year. There is nothing objective (like a piece of paper) that states the company is worth 400K. It is all about perceived value. Some investors may think it is worth something because of some knowledge they may have. Heck, the company could be worth nothing but the investor could have some sentimental value associated to it. So is it actually the case that E's company is worth 400k only AFTER the transaction? It is worth what someone pays for it when they pay for it. I repeat- the 400K valuation is subjective. In return the investor is getting 25% ownership of the product or company. The idea is that when someone has ownership, they have a vested interest in it being successful. In that case, the investor will do whatever he/she can to improve the chances of success (in addition to supplying the 100K capital). For instance, the investor will leverage their network or perhaps put more money into it in the future. Is the 100k added to the balance sheet as cash? Perhaps. It is an asset that may later be used to fund inventory (for instance). ... and would the other 300k be listed as an IP asset? No. See what I said about the valuation just being perception. Note that the above analysis doesn't apply to all Dragons Den deals. It only applies to situations where capital is exchanged for ownership in the form of equity. "Time to learn how accounting works!  When a company loses money, it does not pay taxes. Just throwing numbers out, but suppose GE earned - $10 billion (that's a negative) in 2009. If in 2010 it earned $5 billion, it would not pay any taxes. It wouldn't pay taxes until it got back to even.   Tax refund is nonsense. It is a tax asset, which is reported as ""income"" when it is recognized on the books. So when GE recognized its ""$3.4 billion tax refund,"" it was actually noting that it would not have to pay cash taxes until it made enough to generate a tax burden over and beyond $3.4 billion." I'd like to add that many companies offer Divident Re-Investment Plans or DRIPs, which is basically a regular automatic stock purchase program. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend_reinvestment_plan. While your stock broker may offer dividend reinvestment, this is not the same as a DRIP. DRIPs are offered directly by the company, rather than the stock broker. They have the added benefits that the stock purchases are almost always commission-free, and in some cases, the company even offers a discount on the stock price. It can take a little more effort to get enrolled in a DRIP, but if you are interested in holding the stock long-term, this is a good option to consider.