>probably $10 billion in profit

Can you expand on this number or is it vibes-based? I'd be surprised if $10b profit was made from Service Advisor.

Anecdata; we've had a handful of problems with our tractor "computers" recently, and we haven't been charged a dime by the dealer. Our newest is 2018 model so definitely not covered by warranty.

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syntaxing 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not OP but I went through some data and John Deere makes 5B NET profit for the worse years. 10B for their best (only looking back 10 years). I wouldn’t be surprised these anticompetitive (as in anti “consumer”) has netted them north of 10B.

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SideQuark 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams, given the amount of physical goods they sell.

Nothing in their SEC filings shows anything mentionable about such claims. It does break out actual profit by company sectors.

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syntaxing 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Admittedly I have never worked in the agriculture industry, but I have been a mechanical engineer for multiple industries before I became a software engineer (a good 5 years I was in a position where I quoted customers). You really cannot imagine that out of the 44B gross revenue and 5B net, that a "non tiny fraction" was not related to right the repair? Collections of receivables + Proceeds from sales of equipment on operating leases is north of half of the 44B gross. How much of that gross would have not existed should there been a third party market to repair and service exist products? I honestly can't give a number but I doubt its "tiny". Look at the car industry, about 20% of the global revenue is aftermarket. You simply cannot naively think that "right to repair" only effects the service contracts. Theres aftermarket parts and 3rd party repair shops that COULD have been a bigger market without John Deere's anticompetive practices.

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cogman10 an hour ago | parent [-]

Yup. The two things John Deere did was make it impossible to diagnose problems with software lockouts and they did software locks for common parts. Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter.

That's what John Deere was up to.

Also, I'd point out that tractors are, by and large, actually pretty simple machines. At their core they are an engine and a hydraulics system. Not much more. The most fancy tractors will obviously have a lot of creature comforts in the cab. GPS, auto steering, AC, etc. But the actual things that do the thing are effectively just solid metal parts that plow through the field or cut down the crop.

Tractors, because they are so simple, but also because they all operate at lower speeds than other vehicles, are almost immoral machines. My family literally has a John Deere from the 40s that starts up just fine. We also have a Massie from the the 70s that still operates just fine. And our newest Massie from the 00s is still doing farm work. The only reason we got the Massie in the 70s was because it had more horsepower than the John Deere from the 40s. And the only reason for the 00s tractor was because it had a closed cab with AC and more horsepower.

It would not shock me to learn John Deere was also integrating some planned obsolescence to speed up the turn over of their tractors.

	▲	parineum 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter. >That's what John Deere was up to. Is that an actual price and the actual process?

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tjohns 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While I suspect this is actually profitable for them, you can't attribute 100% of their profit to anti-repair activities.

At a minimum, you'd have to break out profit from equipment sales vs service contracts.

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syntaxing 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Posted in another comment but you cannot just think about John Deere's balance sheet. A whole other industry would have existed without John Deere's intervention but they were able to capture a lot of the GROSS revenue due to it. You can look at other non high litigation capture industries like automotive.

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Grombobulous 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This concept of percent of profits shouldn't be considered in the context of fines. For regulations to have teeth, punishments shouldn't just slap you on the wrist just because harmful practices weren't responsible for a lot of profit.

In that scenario, a lot of growth companies or just poorly performing companies could just say "sorry, we don't make any profit, so our maximum fine is $10," and obviously that wouldn't be fair at all.

Fines should really be about "what size fine will be a deterrent for this company?"

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koolba 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Fines should really be about "what size fine will be a deterrent for this company?"

To a degree. But it also has to be commensurate to the actual market size and impact. If an Amazon releases a defective dog toy that is bought by 10 people, it’d be unreasonable to fine them $100 billion dollars just because they’re a huge company.

	▲	timschmidt 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Depends entirely on whether or not you think Amazon actually caring about the fine and bothering to do anything to prevent it recurring is part of the goal. If it is, the fine must be large enough to matter against the backdrop of corporate P&L. Courts have an entire category for this type of fine: punitive damages.
	▲	bothers 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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hekkle 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well 500 million alone would come from "software". Which is "required" to be up to date for diagnostics, to fix anything else. https://www.thedailyupside.com/industries/tractor-giant-john...

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cyanydeez 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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astafrig 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> google's ai says

Copy-pasting AI output is uninteresting and rude.

	▲	Computer0 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Especially google's

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yard2010 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In 2025 John Deere net income was $4,998m. $1m is 0.02% of that. They make it in less than 2 days. Imagine making money in an unlawful way for years then paying only 2 days worth of salary.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DE/deere/cash-flow...

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taurath an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I made an educated guess that John Deere is roughly the size of Monsanto so in the tens of billions category, which is usually enough revenue to play really dirty with senators, regulators, lobbyists, and customers.