"Investing" in the context you describe is the very act of purchasing a portion of a company and expecting the management to turn a profit on the resources that they have available to them. If you buy a share in Coca Coca, one of billions of others, you own a tiny slice of that company - which has many bottling plants, intellectual property, highly skilled staff, excellent trademarks among many other assets. Each year it makes a profit, which is distributed to the shareholders, employees and management through various means. By owning those shares, you trust that the management in place are doing all they can to effectively place the company money into profitable enterprises to at a minimum sustain current profits and ideally to seek out growth in profits. This will normally mean efficiency savings or potentially expansion that creates new jobs.