It absolutely counts. We invest in companies for their future profits.
When you do 50M revenue and improve the bottom line 1% it's 500k profit for investors. But when you do 1 billion revenue and improve by the same 1% it's 10 million for investors. That's 20x the future potential.
Potential of a 50M company in a 20% margin industry is only 10 mil profit per year, never going to go much beyond that. But the potential of a 1B company in the same industry is 200M profit per year.
That's why companies like Uber, Tesla etc saw such high valuations when they were still losing fortunes every year. Everyone knew their future potential.