Meaning
A product, business, or investment that reliably generates steady profit with little further investment required.
Unlike a risky or fast-growing venture, a cash cow is valued precisely for being unglamorous and predictable — its job is to keep producing income, not to grow.
Origin
The image builds on the much older “milch cow” (a dairy cow kept for milking), documented in English since the early 1600s as a metaphor for any dependable source of income. The specifically business sense of “cash cow” is usually credited to management consultant Peter Drucker, who used it in the mid-1960s to describe a product with strong market share in a market that was no longer growing. The term became standard business vocabulary once the Boston Consulting Group formalized it in the early 1970s as one of four categories — alongside “star,” “question mark,” and “dog” — in its influential growth-share matrix for evaluating a company’s product portfolio.
Examples
The printer division stopped growing years ago, but it’s still the company’s biggest cash cow.
That old product line is a cash cow — barely any marketing spend, and it still sells.
Investors love a reliable cash cow more than a flashy but unprofitable startup.
A: “Why haven’t they discontinued that product?” B: “Because it’s a cash cow — pure profit at this point.”
Frequently asked questions
What does 'Cash cow' mean?
A product, business, or investment that reliably generates steady profit with little further investment required.
Unlike a risky or fast-growing venture, a cash cow is valued precisely for being unglamorous and predictable — its job is to keep producing income, not to grow.