Sorry UK; could you please be more specific about where I have said that all 'cash cows' make a decent profit?
A cash cow in my opinion is a business that has already been set up and established with a reliable client base and a respectable margin of profit. It might be a bank or a Building Society; an oil company; a supermarket chain or a firm of accountants, for example and it would continue to make trading profits without much input from its, probably overpaid, management executives. Whether that profit reaches the shareholders or not is a different matter.