Do monopolies always seek to profit maximise?

There are two types of monopoly, a legal monopoly which has over 25% of the market share and a dominant monopoly which has over 40%. Both of these types have power over the market as they will be the largest firm in it. Therefore, some key features of monopolies are their access to economies of scale (because they are large enough to take advantage of deals, technology and professionals that smaller firms can’t); high barriers to entry (their power makes it difficult for other firms to enter the market; price maker (they can choose the market price of the good as they have power over production) and profit maximisation. Profit maximisation is a business aim and it is something that a monopoly can do due to its ability to change the market, as a monopoly it can set the price and the amount it supplies. This means it can choose to produce at the point where Marginal Revenue=Marginal Cost (show diagram). At this point, the price is set higher than the average costs so they are above average revenue and the company is able to make supernormal profits. However, a monopoly may not seek to profit maximise for a few reasons. Firstly, although we can see where marginal costs and marginal revenue are on the diagram it is difficult to actually determine this point in real life meaning a monopoly may not actually be able to tell when it is profit maximising. Secondly, some monopolies may be subject to competition if they increased their prices so instead of profit maximising they focus on another business aim such as sales revenue maximisation (maximising the amount of sales they receive as opposed to the profit). This will ensure other firms are unable to enter the market as they can’t compete and can be seen as something that sports direct do. Finally, the monopoly may simply choose to take on a different business aim such as the sales revenue maximisation or profit satisficing (only making enough profit to keep shareholders happy) or maximising utility (effectively making their customers happy). Therefore, profit maximisation is a key feature of a monopoly because of it’ ability to do so but in the real world this is not always possible and there may be reasons why they choose not to.