It's more likely they won't become profitable because they overestimated how much they'll save - not because they underestimated how much they'll lose.
But products cost money to run and maintain - isn't it perfectly plausible they were able to identify 20% of the people worked on a set of products that were in totality not profitable or even costing money?
Given the nature of branching from your core competencies into dice rolls, that sounds not just plausible to me, but even probable. Maybe I am missing something though.