Cash flow, in general, refers to payments made into or out of a business, project, or financial product.
Cash flows are narrowly interconnected with the concepts of value, interest rate, and liquidity.
This transformation process is known as discounting, and it takes into account the time value of money by adjusting the nominal amount of the cash flow based on the prevailing interest rates at the time.
The term is flexible and can refer to time intervals spanning over past-future.
However, Company A is actually earning more cash by its core activities and has already spent 45M in long term investments, of which the revenues will only show up after three years.