Growth is a bit more important. Perhaps you missed two big announcements today? Ford is putting Sirius into its cars and trucks, and they are working with Delphi and Microsoft to deliver video to automobiles for use in overhead and backseat video systems.
Sirius added 400,000 subscribers in the last quarter and now has over 1 million customers. How many dotcoms had one million customers in their first year of operation?
No, it doesn't matter how big you are if you can't turn a profit. US Air is bigger than AirTran or JetBlue, but either of the latter is a far better investment than US Air. On rare occasion, it is a legitimate business practice to sacrifice earnings on a short term basis to buy market share, but the dot com experience proved that ignoring profits is a sure path to oblivion.
For the short term swing trader, stock price is the only thing that matters, in spite of earnings, growth, or any other fundamental measure. For long term traders, growth is important but only if it is sustainable and ultimately leads to profit. A lot of internet companies were growing like crazy in the 1990s but had no fundamental strength. Indeed, measures like EBIT were designed to let people measure a companies finances without concern for interest and taxes since so many dot coms had such crappy earnings and were so leveraged that looking at net earnings would scare everyone away. So lets not consider the negative stuff. If the company didnt have to pay taxes or repay its debt it would be making a ton!
By the way, one cautionary word. I bought Iomega stock back in the late 1990s. Heck, with Zip disks they had the only computer storage that was worth anything since floppies were useless. And Zip drives and disks were flying off shelves. I figured this cant lose. Uh huh. They killed me! Better luck with your investments!