A random sample of 79 companies from the Forbes 500 list (which actually consists of nearly 800 companies) was selected, and the relationship between sales (in hundreds of thousands of dollars) and profits (in hundreds of thousands of dollars) was investigated by regression. The following simple linear regression model was used

Profits = ₀ + ₁(Sales)

This model was fit to the data using the method of least squares. The following results were obtained from statistical software.

R² = 0.662

S = 466.2

Predictor Coef SE Coef

Constant -176.644 61.16

Sales 0.092498 0.0075

The correlation between sales and profits is