This text was originally written by Marx and published in 1849, and was updated by Engels almost half a decade later, after the death of Marx. The text is an introduction to capitalism and overlaps with parts of Capital. You can read the text here.
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This is wrong, the process of capital reproduction is seen as M-C-C’-M’, its a process of constant investment and profit, the rate of profit being the delta between M-M’. Investment doesn’t have to be external to be considered investment. So yeah rate of profit = return of investment, its just different jargon.
The simplest process possible may be M-M’, think of a credit where one lends money and expects money+interest back, interest being straight up the rate of profit/ROI. Maybe a robbery would be simply M’, and still i think there is some degree of investment on a robbery.
No, you are confusing things. You are confusing corporate finance terms with terms used by Marx’s analysis of the reproduction of capital. Marx is not concerned with corporate finance terms since the scope of analysis is very different, since finance and economics (actually political economy) are different (albeit related) disciplines.
ROI is usually tied to financial assets, for example stocks. So if I invest $100 in stock X and after 1 year they are worth $300, and paid $50 as dividends, then my ROI is 250%. ROI can also be calculated over any kind of investment, be it real estate, stocks, bonds etc. ROI inside of a corporation can also be calculated over a project or over a market campaign. Note that ROI may or may not be tied directly to surplus value, as one can have ROI without any labor involved, such as in case of a marketing campaign increasing product visibility, or a house increasing in price over time. I say directly because in the macro level, all capital gains are the result of surplus value (all things in the end are either extracted from workers or paid by workers), but this is not always true in the micro level.
A company’s profit (usually calculated based on a fiscal year), is basically all revenues minus all expenses. From the expenses, you need to count all inputs, wages, rent, maintenance, fees, capital expenses, taxes etc. Revenue includes capital gains (from investment in bonds, for example) and sales, which are directly tied to the production process. Note that a company’s profits are more aligned with the idea of the circuit of capital that Marx describes, since it’s related to an actual production process over a window of time.
ROI and profit can coincide in a sense that a capitalist invested $10000 in a new company and over 5 years it returned to him $20000 in net profit (summing up net profit from all 5 years), having a ROI of 100% over that time period. But only in such situations, since the terms mean different things.