See Figure 1, below. Net income, revenue, operating cash flow, capital expenditures, and assets were all up for Q1 2025 compared to the year-ago period; can’t complain about that. 

Now onto the less pleasant stuff. First, cash is a mere 0.6 percent higher this quarter than one year ago. That’s not welcome right now, with recession fears circling like seagulls at the beach. Cash is always important in a recession. 

Second, notice that companies’ cost of revenue is up 4 percent — not so far behind overall revenue, up 4.7 percent. This is the second week running that we’ve seen cost of revenue within spitting distance of revenue. If tariffs or other pressures push cost of revenue up even further, that could drive companies to raise prices on their finished goods and re-ignite inflation. Walmart ($WMT) raised exactly that fear in an earnings statement this week, so watch this issue. 

Also note that 17.2 percent jump in net income. It might sound like a brisk jump, but beware! Roughly $26 billion in net income this quarter was attributed to non-recurring items. If you strip those numbers out, net income only grew 9 percent — not bad, but certainly not 17.2 percent.

Balance Sheets Stronger

We also continue to be fascinated by the overall balance sheet of corporations these days. 

In last week’s earnings update, which looked at only 2,000-ish firms, collective book value (total assets minus total liabilities) in Q1 2025 was 8.3 percent higher compared to Q1 2024. 

This week, with some 1,400 more firms added into the sample, book value is even higher: 8.49 percent. (This also means average stockholder equity is also up $247 million from one year ago.) See Figure 2, below.

So even though total cash is flirting with red ink, and presumably lots of individual firms have worse balance sheets — at the biggest of big pictures, the overall state of Corporate America is still good. A stronger balance sheet means a company is better positioned to weather economic difficulties that might arise. Calcbench will conduct a deeper analysis of balance sheet health next week.

Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.

If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 

Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at info@calcbench.com.

The bottom line: across a wide swath of Corporate America, the first quarter went pretty well. 

Figure 1, below, tells the tale. It tracks the earnings data of more than 2,000 non-financial companies, comparing Q1 2025 numbers to the year-earlier period. Net income, revenue, operating cash flow, capital expenditures, and cash were all up.

One point that does give pause is cost of revenue; it’s up 3.3 percent compared to one year ago, which isn’t that far behind revenue, up 3.9 percent. If tariffs or other pressures push cost of revenue up even further, that could drive companies to raise prices on their finished goods (to protect profit margins) and re-ignite inflation. Watch that one.

Also note that 16.9 percent jump in net income. It might sound like a healthy jump, but beware! Roughly $26 billion in net income this quarter was attributed to non-recurring items. If you strip those numbers out, net income only grew 9 percent — not bad, but certainly not 16.9 percent.

Balance Sheets Stronger

Another interesting morsel we noticed is that companies’ balance sheets are getting stronger. That is, the collective book value of our 2,000+ firms — defined as total assets minus total liabilities — was 8.3 percent higher in Q1 2025 compared to Q1 2024. See Figure 2, below.

Obviously plenty of individual firms will have worse balance sheets than one year ago, but when looking at the biggest of pictures, this is good news: a stronger balance sheet means a company is better positioned to weather economic difficulties that might arise. Calcbench will conduct a deeper analysis of balance sheet health next week.

Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.

If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 

Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at info@calcbench.com.

Regular readers of this blog know that Calcbench offers earnings templates for several industries, which capture earnings data automatically as companies file their reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You do need to be a Calcbench premium subscriber and have our Excel Add-in installed for the templates to run — and after that, the template runs on autopilot.

For the airlines, our template captures several useful non-GAAP metrics:

• RASM, or revenue per available seat mile (sometimes with a “T” in front for “total” revenue;

• CASM, or cost per available seat mile;

• Load factor, which is the percentage of seats filled by passengers;

• Fuel costs, and average cost per gallon.

Figure 1, below, shows what you can do with that analysis. It charts RASM in the top portion, measured in cents; and EPS in the lower portion, measured in dollars (or fractions thereof). 

As one can see, RASM among all six airlines has somewhat narrowed lately into a tighter band, although RASM also trended downward in first-quarter compared to late 2024. 

Anyway, you can download our airlines template from DropBox if you want. It won’t automatically update if you’re not a Calcbench premium subscriber, but you can still take a look and see what’s possible. We have other industry templates too, such as for blockbuster drug sales and even for Tesla deliveries!

If you do want to become a subscriber, drop us a line at us@calcbenc.com any time; we can get you set up straight away.

The Calcbench prediction: somewhere around $31. Are we right? 

We arrived at that conclusion after some quick analysis of DoorDash’s latest earnings report, filed on Tuesday morning. Along with all the usual financial numbers, the delivery giant also reports two notable non-GAAP metrics. One is the total number of orders in the period, and the other is “marketplace GOV” — the total dollar value of all orders completed, including taxes, tips, and applicable fees. (“GOV” stands for “gross order value.”)

So if you divide that number of total orders into marketplace GOV, you can calculate an average dollar value per order. 

Well, we did that math. It gave us a surprising insight into the DoorDash story.

First let’s look at the raw numbers. We started by pulling up DoorDash’s Q1 2025 earnings release to find this period’s total orders (732 million) and marketplace GOV ($23.1 billion). Then we used the See Tag History feature to pull up prior disclosures for each quarter from the start of 2021. The result is Figure 1, below.

At first glance those two lines seem to tell an impressive tale. GOV (the red line) has been climbing briskly for the last four years, while total orders (the blue line) has barely budged upwards, but that’s an illusion due to the vast differences in scale: millions for total orders, billions for GOV. Both metrics have actually been growing at roughly similar rates:

• Total orders went from 329 million at the start of 2021 to 732 million in first-quarter 2025, an increase of 122.5 percent.

• Marketplace GOV went from $9.9 billion to $23.1 billion in the same period, an increase of 133.3 percent.

So if you divide total orders into marketplace GOV to calculate an average dollar value per order, and then chart that number over time, the average value per order has hardly moved at all in the last four years. See Figure 2, below.

Average order value went from $30.09 at the start of 2021 to $31.56 today, a growth rate of only 4.9 percent. Across all 17 quarters, the average order was $30.78. (Hence our $31 prediction at the top of this post.)

One last thing, here's the implied revenue per order based and the revenue % per order.

Why does analysis like this matter? Because it helps a financial analyst to better understand DoorDash’s strategic challenges. 

That is, if DoorDash consumers keep spending roughly the same amount of money per order, rather than spending more per order — then DoorDash will need to keep getting more customers and grow by scale. So where will those future customers come from? 

Will DoorDash need to acquire its way to a larger customer footprint? (Oh look, the company just announced plans to acquire Deliveroo, a British delivery rival, for $3.9 billion!) Will it need to expand into other food and dining services? (Look again, DoorDash also announced that it will pay $1.2 billion for SevenRooms, a restaurant booking service.) 

More to the point, DoorDash clearly must do something, because this quarter’s revenues ($3.03 billion) missed expectations. While the company is profitable overall (which is more than we could say about the year-earlier period), it isn’t growing fast enough for Wall Street expectations.

A clever analyst could ferret out that insight with the right data — which, as always, Calcbench can deliver.

First are the overall numbers for OshKosh ($OSK), which weren’t great. Revenue for the quarter was $2.3 billion, down 9.1 percent from the year-earlier period. Meanwhile operating expenses rose 6.7 percent, primarily due to a jump in sales, general & administrative costs. That and other various items resulted in net income at $112.2 million, down 37.5 percent.

Then we dug further into OshKosh’s operating segments, because that’s what senior management talked about in its earnings release:

• An Access segment, which manufactures “mobile aerial work platforms and telehandlers” which “position workers and materials at elevated heights.” 

• A Vocational segment, which makes trucks, cranes, command cars, and other heavy-duty vehicles for fire departments, airports, recycling businesses, and so forth.

• A Defense segment, which makes tactical vehicles for militaries around the world, as well as U.S. Post Office trucks. 

At the top of the earnings release, management reports that revenue and operating income for the Access segment declined 22.7 percent and 50.5 percent, respectively, primarily due to reduced sales volume in North America and higher sales discounts. 

Meanwhile, revenue and operating income for the Vocational segment went up, by 12.2 percent and 47.1 percent respectively, primarily due to better sales of garbage and recycling trucks. Yay for refuse removal!

In the Defense segment, sales decreased by 9.1 percent and operating income plummeted by 95.5 percent. That was largely due to lower sales of military vehicles to the U.S. Defense Department, partly offset by “next-generation vehicle” production for the Post Office. 

OK, that’s the snapshot — but how does that segment performance look like over time? 

To answer that question, we first scrolled down the earnings release to the non-GAAP disclosures that OshKosh makes about operating income per segment. See Figure 1, below, neatly providing a period-over-period comparison.

You might notice that the above table does not include the Defense segment. That’s because operating income for the Defense segment is pretty much immaterial to total operating income; it was only $600,000 in this previous quarter, and rarely exceeded $10 million or so in the last 13 quarters. 

Still, using our Search Tag History capability, you can dig up segment-level operating income for all three segments, even though OshKosh didn’t present Defense in the table above. Figure 2, below, shows the quarterly operating income for all three. 

As one can see, operating income is declining in the Access unit — and while operating income is rising in the Vocational unit, right now it doesn’t seem to be rising fast enough to offset the Access unit’s decline. Meanwhile, operating income from the Defense unit is at best nothing special. 

All that said, there’s more to the story. OshKosh has also been restructuring its operating segments lately. That’s a routine thing at large companies, but for astute financial analysis you need to know such restructuring has happened. 

For example, right after OshKosh presents operating income for its various segments, it includes this footnote disclosure:

In July 2024, the Company moved the reporting responsibility for Pratt Miller from its Defense segment to the Chief Technology and Strategic Sourcing Officer to better utilize Pratt Miller’s expertise across the entire Oshkosh Corporation enterprise. Pratt Miller results are now reported within "Corporate and other" and historical information has been recast to reflect the change.

Pratt Miller is a defense-related business that OshKosh acquired back in 2020. OshKosh had been including Pratt Miller’s results in its defense segment, but those results weren’t terribly good (management described them as “unfavorable” in this quarter’s press release). Now they’ve been moved to the company’s “corporate” segment, which companies often use as a catch-all for other business operations that don’t naturally fit with any larger operating segment. 

We also decided to look at OshKosh’s segment operating income on an annual basis, to smooth out any seasonal quirks that might distort quarterly analysis. Those results are in Figure 2, below.

Annual data shows a somewhat different picture. Clearly the Access unit saw good operating income growth in the last several years, and to a smaller extent the Vocational unit has too. On the other hand, when you look at the quarter-by-quarter operating income numbers, you can’t help but wonder whether operating income declines in the Access unit in latter 2024 and early 2025 might be the start of a trend.

We at Calcbench don’t know the answer to that question. We simply provide the data and tools to let you examine a company’s disclosures from multiple angles and across multiple periods. Sometimes complicated pictures emerge — and then you can approach management prepared to ask the best questions, to get the answers you need.

That got us wondering how McDonalds’ recent results compared to a few other fast-food rivals. We dug into the data, and belt-tightening among North America or U.S. consumers seems to be in vogue right now.

Figure 1, below, shows the change in quarterly same-store sales for McDonalds ($MCD), Chipotle Mexican Grille ($CMG), and Starbucks ($SBUX). 

First, a few caveats so everyone understands exactly what the data above captures. For McDonalds, the changes are in U.S. stores only. For Chipotle it is all stores, but nearly all Chipotle locations are in the United States and overseas locations are essentially immaterial. For Starbucks it is North America stores, which is primarily the United States and also Canada. 

All that said, the broad trend here is so pronounced that those variations in the data probably don’t matter. U.S. consumers have been their mouths and their wallets to fast-food joints lately.

The better question to ask is why those trends are happening, and whether those root causes are company-specific or economy-general. For example, Starbucks has been suffering through same-store sales declines for a year — but that’s more due to Starbucks’ operational missteps (complex menu, less appealing stores) than to consumer unease over tariffs and recession.

On the other hand, Chipotle had been chugging along perfectly well for the last year, right until the start of this year. So perhaps its sudden same-store sales decline is more due to consumer unease with the economy.

You can pull together this segment-level data easily and quickly (the chart above took us less than 10 minutes) in several ways through Calcbench. One way is our Export Earnings Model feature from the Recent Filings page, which we’ve discussed previously. You can also hold your cursor over any specific data point you see in a company’s earnings release and then use the “See Tag History” feature to view that disclosure’s value in prior periods or export all that data into Excel. 

In short, Calcbench has numerous ways to let you get precise, industry-specific, segment-level data that opens a whole new window of analysis into firms you follow. Then you can ask better questions, get better answers, and make better decisions. 

Filed under: Food for thought.

Specifically, HCA Healthcare ($HCA) and Centene Corp. ($CNC) both filed their first-quarter 2025 earnings releases on Friday morning; while Molina Healthcare ($MOH) filed its release yesterday. 

Calcbench specifically wanted to study the revenues each firm has been receiving from Medicaid, the U.S. federal government’s health insurance program for low-income residents. All three firms report Medicaid spending as a distinct operating segment, so we charted out quarterly Medicaid revenues each one has reported since the start of 2022. See Figure 1, below. 

Obviously Centene is the kingpin here, with more than double the Medicaid revenues of Molina and HCA combined. That said, Moline and HCA have both seen faster growth in Medicaid revenue (roughly 36 percent each) than Centene (9.8 percent) over the last three years. 

In fact, to better understand that growth, Figure 2 shows Medicaid spending for HCA and Molina only, so we can examine the numbers more clearly. 

(Please note that we don’t have Q1-2025 revenues for HCA yet because we pulled Molina and Centene numbers from their earnings releases; HCA only reports its Medicaid segment in its 10-Q, which it had yet to file. To that point, HCA actually discloses two separate Medicaid segments, from the federal government and from states; our numbers above reflect both segments added together.)

Why are Medicaid revenues worth tracking? Keep in mind that cuts to Medicaid spending are a political hot potato that lawmakers in Congress have been tossing back and forth for years. Indeed, Congress will be back in session next week, with further debate about fiscal 2026 spending on the agenda. If lawmakers ever do enact extensive cuts to Medicaid — and it’s not at all clear that they will — that could have implications for healthcare companies that depend on Medicaid spending for their revenue streams.

Calcbench subscribers can dig up healthcare firms’ revenue from Medicaid (as well as Medicare and other insurance plans) in several ways:

• Our Segments and Rollforwards database, where you can search by operating segment; usually Medicaid will come up immediately as its own segment.

• Our Recent Filings page, where you can use the Earnings Model option on the right side of the company listing that catches your eye. 

• Our Disclosures and Footnotes database, where you can pull up a company’s latest quarterly filing and read the full Segments footnote. 

The defense contractors are Lockheed Martin ($LMT), Northrop Grumman ($NOC), and RTX Corp. ($RTX). All filed their first-quarter earnings releases within a few minutes of each other on Tuesday morning, crammed with interesting disclosures. 

Calcbench wanted to focus specifically on order backlog. Why? Because (a) all three companies report order backlogs, although each one in its own unique way; (b) order backlog can be an important sign of a defense contractor’s long-term health; and (c) order backlog could also become an even more important sign in the future, as countries spar with the United States over tariffs and military alliances. 

Anyway, we pulled up the order backlog disclosures for all three companies going back to Q1 2023. The result is Figure 1, below.

As you can see, Lockheed Martin seems to dwarf Northrop Grumman and RTX for order backlog, but that’s only somewhat true. These are defense-related backlogs, and RTX actually has a far larger commercial backlog not shown here. 

If we included commercial and defense-related backlog together, RTX would have quarterly backlog well above $200 billion — but that wouldn’t be an apples-to-apples comparison of defense orders, so we excluded the commercial numbers. 

We can also see that while Lockheed’s defense backlog is far larger than RTX and Northrop Grumman, that backlog dipped noticeably from late 2024 to first-quarter 2025, while the backlog for RTX and Northrop held steady. Then again, those two companies also had notable dips from one quarter to the next in 2023 and 2024, and subsequently recovered; one quarter’s dip does not a worrisome trend make.

Anyway, this data (and much more) is there for the taking. You can find it in any of several ways. On the Recent Filings page, you can click on the Earnings Model option on the right side of your screen, which will immediately conjure up a spreadsheet with each disclosure neatly listed and tagged. You can find the backlog item, and then start looking backwards to previous periods’ filings to see how the number has changed over time. 

Alternatively, you can use our Disclosures & Footnotes database to pull up the earnings releases of these three companies (or any similar company) to see what they report for backlog. 

As we noted above, each of our three companies today reports backlog data in its own unique way. For example, Lockheed reports total order backlog and backlog of four separate operating units; Northrop Grumman reports total backlog as well as “funded” and “unfunded” segments (Figure 1 reflects total backlog)); while RTX reports defense and commercial backlog (so, as discussed, we excluded commercial backlog). 

Now consider what backlog might tell us. If backlog starts going higher, is that because customers are placing orders like crazy, or because supply chain restrictions leave defense contractors unable to finish the goods? If the number starts falling, is that because the defense contractor is getting more goods out the door quickly, or because customers are canceling orders? 

Calcbench doesn’t know the answers to those questions. We do, however, have the data to help you frame such questions and evaluate the answers more effectively.

Carmax runs on an off-kilter earnings calendar, so today’s numbers were for its fiscal and fourth-quarter 2025, which actually ended on Feb. 28. The numbers: full-year revenue declined 0.7 percent to $26.3 billion, while net income rose 4.5 percent to $500.5 million — although most of that increase was thanks to a $16.8 million drop in the company’s interest expense.

More interesting to us, however, were the many and varied disclosures Carmax made about the used car business. Those disclosures include… 

• Total number of vehicles purchased in the period;

• Number of vehicles purchased from consumers and from dealers;

• Total unit sales, grouped into retail and wholesales segments;

• Gross profit per retail unit and per wholesale unit;

• Profit margin per retail unit for the company’s extended protection plan. 

Our personal favorite, however, is average selling price per used vehicle. We charted that disclosure from the start of 2022 through first-quarter 2025. The result is Figure 1, below.

Average used car price (sold at the retail level, not wholesale) dropped from $29,310 at the start of 2022 to $26,130 by early 2025 — a decline of 10.8 percent. 

Why? Well, think back to early 2022. The global supply chain was still a clogged and kinky mess, and used cars were hard to find. Prices for used vehicles actually rose immediately after the pandemic… and then, in time, supply-chain issues smoothed out and prices declined. That same story is reflected in Figure 1, above. 

We should note that Carmax’s share price has fluctuated wildly in recent weeks: a 52-week high of $89 in mid-February, down to $69.25 in mid-March, then back up to $82.77 at the start of this month. This week Carmax plummeted to $66 per share, but considering the markets overall these days, that’s not an exclusive club.

Our point is simply that if you want to do deep, sophisticated analytics of firm performance — like, say, digging into average used car prices when you’re following an auto retailer — that data exists. Calcbench captures it, quickly and clearly. All you need to do is know what you want to look for.

Delta and all the other airlines always make for fun earnings analysis, because they’re a great example of the non-GAAP disclosures that companies make. Calcbench dutifully tracks those disclosures, and has automated templates ready to go for those who want the latest data pulled together and ready for analysis. 

For example, our airline industry template automatically pulls disclosures such as revenue per available seat mile (RASM), cost per available seat mile (CASM), load factor (the higher it is, the more efficiently the airline is putting butts on seats), and even fuel consumed and average fuel price. Plus all the regular metrics like, ya know, revenue and EPS and that stuff. 

Please beware that our airline template only works for people who (a) have installed the Calcbench Excel Add-in; and (b) are premium level Calcbench subscribers — but if you are, then the data feeds run automatically as each airline publishes earnings. You’ll typically see the latest data populated into your template within a few minutes of that data being filed at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Figure 1, below, shows both diluted EPS for the six major U.S. airlines (bottom set of lines) and RASM (top set of lines) from the start of 2020 through 2024, pulled on Tuesday of this week from our airline template. This is the material that will be updated automatically for the next few weeks as those airlines file their Q1 2025 reports. 

As for Delta specifically, Figure 2 below shows RASM versus CASM for the last four years, with Q1 2025 data added this morning just a few minutes after Delta filed its earnings release at 6:30 a.m. ET. 

We’ll be publishing more earnings snippets in days and weeks to come; and don’t forget our world-renowned Calcbench Earnings Tracker, which compiles earnings performance every quarter compared to the year-earlier period. We don’t have enough 2025 filings yet to launch the tracker for Q1, but it will be up and running soon!

As you may have already heard, Tesla ($TSLA) published an update this week on its first-quarter 2025 performance. The news was not good: the company delivered only 336,681 vehicles, 13 percent lower than the year-ago period and well below Wall Street expectations of 390,000. 

The crack Calcbench research team then swung into action to put those numbers in context. We charted quarterly vehicle deliveries and production for the last five years, to get a sense of Tesla’s historical performance. The result was Figure 1, below.

As you can see, both cars delivered to customers (in blue) and cars produced by Tesla factories (in orange) fell to their lowest levels in three years. Others can speculate about whether the drop is due to Elon Musk’s political activism, would-be buyers pausing their purchases until we have more clarity on the Trump Administration’s tariffs, or other reasons. Calcbench is just here to provide the data so you can speculate in an informed, data-driven manner. 

Calcbench can also help you speculate in a more granular manner, too! Because Tesla reports production and delivery numbers for its Model 3 (the most popular model Tesla offers), we can track Model 3 performance over time and compare that vehicle line to all others (models S, X, Y, and cybertrucks). 

First we have Figure 2, tracking production of the Model 3.

And now Figure 3, tracking Model 3s delivered.

Now comes the best part. Because we love financial data and analysis that much, we have made our template for tracking Tesla delivery and production numbers publicly available. You can download it from DropBox, and the template will automatically update with new numbers every time Tesla reports. 

The automatic updates only work if you (a) are a Calcbench Premium subscriber; and (b) have installed our Excel Add-in, but that’s all there is to it. Then your Tesla analytics will run on autopilot. 

Incidentally, if you have ideas for other industry or corporate templates we should build, let us know. We have several templates available to help you get through earnings season. Drop us a line any time at us@calcbench.com and tell us what’s on your mind.

The question: which U.S. registrants have sunk lots of money into China operations, and are those companies now trying to reduce those investments as trade war frictions increase? 

One way analysts can explore the answer to that question is to look at a company’s disclosures for property, plant, and equipment (PP&E) specifically in China — a number that dozens of companies do disclose every year, typically tucked away somewhere in the PP&E footnote. Our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts database lets you pull that disclosure out, so you can see how large it is and how it changes over time. 

For example, we used the Segments database to search for all U.S. registrants who reported PP&E in China in their 2024 annual reports. We found 131 firms, which altogether disclosed $71.7 billion in China-based PP&E —  12.8 percent of the $559 billion in total PP&E those same firms reported. 

Figure 1, below, shows some of the firms reporting the largest amounts of China-based PP&E. 

Please note that we excluded two firms from Table 1 that did have extensive China PP&E (AerCap Holdings and Linde) because while they are listed in the United States, they’re headquartered overseas (in the Netherlands and the U.K., respectively). 

Understanding a company’s China PP&E can be helpful to financial analysis in several ways. For example, the Trump Administration might impose heavy import duties on goods from that country. A global manufacturer with operations in China might then want to move those operations to another, un-tariffed country, which might require more capital expenditures in the future as the company expands its PP&E elsewhere. (Think of all those manufacturers announcing lately that they plan to spend zillions on infrastructure investments in the United States.) 

Plus, if a company does decide to move more of its operations away from China, what happens to those Chinese assets? Could they be sold for cash? Will they need some sort of impairment or accelerated depreciation sometime in the future? If any of those things happen, is the China PP&E number large enough to be a material item? 

That’s why knowing the PP&E number matters. You can find it in Calcbench by… 

1. Going to our Segments database; 

2. Selecting geographic segments as the segment you want to investigate;

3. Entering “China” in the standardized geographic segment field; and

4. Seeing which firms report China-based PP&E.

More PP&E Details

You can also track segment-level PP&E disclosures over time. For example, Figure 2, below, shows Apple’s China PP&E for the last several years. Note that Apple ($AAPL) has been reporting less PP&E there, reflecting the company’s efforts to move away from China and the risk of tying its manufacturing operations too closely to one country. 

Now come our warnings. As we’ve said before about geographic disclosures, this analysis will give you a good glimpse into China exposure, but not a complete one. Some firms might report an “Asia-Pacific” segment that includes China among other countries, and there’s no easy way to identify China alone from the rest of that group. Others might not report any geographic segments at all, even though they have operations there. 

Analysts should beware a few more caveats, too. For example, that $4.5 billion in China PP&E reported by Starbucks ($SBUX) is specifically reported as long-lived assets — which definitely does include PP&E, but can also include other goodies such as long-lived intangible assets. Starbucks itself says the assets disclosure in its geographic segments can include “cash and cash equivalents, ROU assets, net property, plant and equipment, equity method and other equity investments, goodwill, and other intangible assets.” 

So if you’re assessing PP&E assets and their possible fate in a trade war, you absolutely should read the underlying footnote for more detail. As always, you can find that footnote simply by clicking on the PP&E number in the Segments database, and Calcbench will whisk you over to the appropriate footnote disclosure for further reading.

For example, in the early 2020s Carnival ($CCL) offered a glimpse into how hospitality businesses first suffered and then recovered from the pandemic. These days Carnival is something of a barometer for consumer spending: if you don’t have lots of money to spend or confidence in your future earnings, you’re probably not dropping lots of cash to go on a cruise. 

Plus, Carnival’s earnings release has numerous disclosures that let you do some fun analysis. So let’s dig in!

Interesting item No. 1 is that Carnival reports two lines of revenue: ticketing sales for future trips, and onboard sales of people buying things while on the boat. We were curious how those two lines of revenue have evolved over time, so we used our Export Data Tables feature to track quarterly revenue for both lines of business for the last four years. See Figure 1, below.

First we should note that these are Carnival’s fiscal quarters, which don’t quite align with calendar quarters. For example, Carnival’s fiscal first-quarter 2025 began on Dec. 1, 2024 and ran through Feb. 28, 2025. 

This means that its best quarter of the year, the fiscal third quarter, runs from June 1 through Aug. 31. Apparently lots of people like summertime cruises before the kids go back to school.

Some observers might then say, “Wait, how do we know that ticketing revenue and onboarding revenue happen in the same quarter? Does Carnival recognize ticketing revenue when the ticket is purchased, even if the trip itself happens in a later quarter?” 

Good question, but the answer is no. Ticketing revenue is recognized in the period when the ticketed trip actually happens. Per Carnival’s own discussion of revenue recognition, which it makes in its 10-Q filings… 

Guest cruise deposits and advance onboard purchases are initially included in customer deposits when received. Customer deposits are subsequently recognized as cruise revenues, together with revenues from onboard and other activities, and all associated direct costs and expenses of a voyage are recognized as cruise costs and expenses, upon completion of voyages with durations of ten nights or less and on a pro rata basis for voyages in excess of ten nights.

Now comes some non-GAAP magic. Carnival also discloses the number of passengers it carries per quarter — which lets us calculate the average customer spend on tickets and onboard goodies over time.

Average Passenger Spend

First let’s track the number of passengers and total onboard spending per quarter since the start of 2021. See Figure 2, below.

OK, both passenger count and onboard spending started 2021 (a quarter that aligned with the 2020 Christmas holiday season, during the depths of covid) at essentially zero, and zoomed back to respectable levels by 2023. The two lines also follow a nearly identical pattern, which should be no surprise: more people on the boat means more total spending by people on said boat.

If you divide onboard spending into passenger count, you can then determine average passenger onboard spending over time — and that gives a rather eye-popping result. See Figure 3, below.

Look at that trend line (in red), zipping upward at a brisk angle. Remember all that talk in 2023 and 2024 about consumer spending marching relentlessly onward, despite fears of a recession that never actually did arrive? That trend line for average passenger spend proves the point. 

We didn’t do an analysis of average ticket price paid per passenger, but we’re confident the data would tell essentially the same story.

The question now, of course, is whether those upward spending patterns will continue in 2025. Carnival’s fiscal first quarter was off to a good start; ticketing sales and onboard spend were up 5.9 and 10.5 percent, respectively, from the year-ago period. 

Then again, by Carnival’s summer high season, tariffs and other economic uncertainty might spook more people to stay home. If that happens, Carnival could be in for rough seas in the latter half of its fiscal year. 

Calcbench doesn’t know what might happen next, but we do have the data to help you understand historical trends and where things might go in the future.

Now Bloomberg has pulled on that thread more strongly, with an in-depth look at how companies adjust the useful lifespan of assets they use. It turns out that numerous companies do this — sometimes extending the estimated lifespan, which can push net income up; and sometimes shortening the estimated lifespan, which pushes net income down.

The key issue here is that as you shorten estimated lifespan, your annual depreciation charges increase; that’s what whittles down net income. The same principle runs in reverse, too: extending estimated lifespan spreads out depreciation across more years, so your annual depreciation is lower; that pushes net income up.

Cynics will suspect that adjustments to estimated lifespan are simply a form of earnings manipulation, and that does indeed happen sometimes. For example, back in 2019 car rental giant Hertz ($HTZ) was sanctioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission for sloppy accounting practices. One of those practices was to extend the estimated lifespan of its vehicle fleet from 24 to 30 months, well beyond industry norms and Hertz’ prior estimates.

Then again, companies do have legitimate reasons for adjusting estimated lifespan, too. For example, a tech firm might scrap some planned strategic shift that would have required new servers, so the existing ones can be used longer than expected. It’s possible that one company might extend the estimated lifespan of its servers, while a peer company decided to shorten it. That’s what happened with Amazon (shortened) and Facebook (extended) just this year. 

Finding Lifespan Adjustments

Finding disclosures about adjustments to estimated lifespan can be tricky, because companies tuck that information away in the footnotes — but fear not! As always, Calcbench makes it easy.

Start at our Multi-Company Search page. There, begin typing “useful life” into the standardized metrics search field on the left side of your screen. You’ll quickly see several choices, all of them related to the PPE (property, plant & equipment) disclosures that all publicly traded companies need to make.

We selected “PPE, Equipment, Useful Life, Maximum” for the S&P 500. You can see the results in Figure 1, below; and note the line for Amazon highlighted in blue.

OK, Amazon extended the estimated lifespan of certain equipment from five years in 2023 to 10 years in 2024. What’s that about? We clicked on our world-famous Trace feature and were immediately whisked away to Amazon’s specific disclosure in its accounting policies footnote. There, we found these disclosures:

In Q4 2024, we completed a useful life study for certain types of heavy equipment and are increasing the useful life from ten years to thirteen years for such equipment effective January 1, 2025. Based on heavy equipment included in “Property and equipment, net” as of December 31, 2024, we estimate an increase in 2025 operating income of approximately $0.9 billion, which will be recorded primarily in “Fulfillment” and impact our North America and International segments.

We completed our most recent servers and networking equipment useful life study in Q4 2024, and are changing the useful lives of a subset of our servers and networking equipment, effective January 1, 2025, from six years to five years. For those assets included in “Property and equipment, net” as of December 31, 2024, whose useful life will change from six years to five years, we anticipate a decrease in 2025 operating income of approximately $0.7 billion.

So Amazon made multiple adjustments to the estimated lifespan of multiple assets, not just computer servers. Taken together, however, the two adjustments essentially cancel out each other’s effect on operating income. 

Analysts would not know any of that by sticking with the fundamental disclosures in the income statement. You’d only know what operating income is (or is expected to be), without any deeper understanding of why operating income is what it is. You wouldn’t understand the quality of Amazon’s earnings.

That’s the insight Calcbench delivers. It lets you ask the probing questions and find the right answers, all with a few keystrokes.

Well, Calcbench ran some numbers — and, um, yeah; that’s pretty accurate. No wonder another Hunger Games book is hitting the shelves.

Specifically, Calcbench examined the revenue and net income disclosures of 1,570 non-financial firms for the last four years. We found that by 2024, the 50 largest firms by revenue accounted for half of all net income for the entire study population. Meanwhile, the remaining 1,520 firms were reporting more net losses year after year and saw average net income per firm decline year after year; while the 50 big boys reported fewer net losses and their average net income went up. 

Let’s unpack all that in a few charts. 

Figure 1, below, shows net income for the 50 largest firms (ranked by 2024 revenue) and net income for the entire population of 1,570 non-financial firms we studied. As you can see, those 50 large firms went from 45 percent of the net income pie in 2021 to 50 percent in 2024.

We then started digging into the net income disclosures of the 1,520 smaller firms, and saw lots of red ink. So we started counting the number of net losses reported by each group. That led us to Figure 2, below.

The pittance of net losses for the 50 large firms isn’t surprising; you’re bound to see one or two every year, and a spot-check revealed no surprises. In 2024, for example, the net losses were reported by Boeing ($BA) and Walgreens-Boots Alliance ($WBA), two firms that both had rough years.

On the other hand, note the rising number of net losses reported by everyone else. One would expect to see more losses in 2022, a year racked by inflation — but then net losses kept marching upward in 2023 and 2024, when the worst of economic headwinds were supposed to be behind us. 

That brings us to the total size of those net income pies. Quite simply, the pie for the 50 largest firms is getting bigger; for everyone else, it’s getting smaller. See Figure 3, below.

Those numbers are not comforting. As a whole, they suggest that smaller firms did not enjoy anywhere near as robust an economic rebound as the largest firms did in 2023 and 2024. Moreover, one has to wonder whether a return of inflation or other shocks (read: trade wars) might send even more small firms into the red in 2025. 

For observers of the macro-economic scene, these are sobering questions. All you need to find the answers is Calcbench.

And for the curious, the 50 large firms we identified were as follows.

Today we want to take a different tack: which U.S. companies import lots of goods from China, which therefore might be subject to the Trump Administration’s new tariffs? 

This is not easy to do, because companies aren’t required to disclose an “imports from China” line-item — but analysts can glean some telling clues, if you know where to look in the disclosures companies do make.

Our example in this exercise is Dollar General Corp. ($DG). The discount retail giant brings in nearly $40 billion in annual revenue by selling ultra-cheap goods, so lots of those items must come from China, right? 

We began by opening our Disclosures & Footnotes tool and searching for “China” in the company’s 2023 Form 10-K. To no surprise, we immediately found references to China in Dollar General’s earnings release and the Risk Factors footnote; no surprise there.

Then we noticed another hit, in the Subsidiaries disclosure. See Figure 1, below (which is only a truncated list of the many, many subsidiaries Dollar General has).

All SEC filers must disclose a list of significant subsidiaries as part of their 10-K filing, to help investors understand the overall structure of the firm. Some companies disclose lots of subsidiaries; some disclose only a few, or none at all if they don’t have them.

Dollar General disclosed two subsidiaries based in China: something called Dolgen V and another called Dollar General Global Sourcing Co., based in the Chinese port city of Shenzhen.

Those two entities are, in tandem, Dollar General’s sourcing arm in China. In two footnotes at the end of the subsidiaries list, Dollar General discloses that Dolgen V is a business trust that serves as the sole investor in the operating company Dollar General Global Sourcing.

So now we know Dollar General does source lots of goods from China — enough that the company bothered to establish a legal presence in country, which is not easy for a U.S. business to do in China.

Alas, we still don’t have specific dollar numbers. Like most businesses, Dollar General doesn’t disclose any breakdown of where its goods come from (that is, imported items subject to U.S. tariffs). Nor does it report any geographic segment revenue for where it sells its goods into (which would be exports subject to China tariffs), although the company does say it only operates in the United States and Mexico.

Plus, while Dollar General clearly must import at least some of its goods from China (which are subject to U.S. tariffs directly), the company also sells plenty of consumer products from manufacturing giants such as Coca Cola, General Mills, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, to name but a few. It’s entirely possible that those suppliers might source some of their own goods or materials from China, which will be subject to U.S. tariffs, and those companies presumably might pass along those higher costs to Dollar General. So that’s yet another way that tariffs could lead to higher costs for Dollar General, which would ultimately show up in DG’s costs of goods sold disclosure.

The Larger Picture

Speaking of other suppliers that might also be subject to tariffs, that begs the question — what other companies have subsidiaries in China? 

Lots of them, apparently. We ran that same “China” disclosure search for the S&P 500 and found 240 that disclosed subsidiaries in China in their most recent annual reports; everyone from Abbott to Zoetis. Calcbench neatly allows you to export the whole list in a spreadsheet, including date of filing and URL so you can trace back to the original source document. You can download the list from DropBox if you’d like.

Indeed, why stop at China? You could run the same analysis for Mexico, Canada, Ireland (a popular subsidiary location for pharma and tech companies) and other countries too. The answers will help you better understand where the company’s operations are, those answers can inform your questions about tariffs, income taxes, and related risks.

Financial analysts can conduct such research yourself with just a few keystrokes. Just do what we did: open the Footnotes & Disclosure database and then search “China” for the companies in your sample group. See what comes up. You’re likely to find the phrase in all sorts of disclosures that a large company makes, including the subsidiaries disclosure.

Then you can ask more focused questions of management on the next earnings call, and keep pushing until management gives you a satisfactory answer.

Fear not, Calcbench has tools to help. 

We wanted to offer one quick example in the form of Illumina Inc. ($ILMN), a San Diego-based maker of high-end equipment for genomics analysis. The Chinese government included Illumina today on a roster of 20 U.S. firms now “blacklisted” in China, meaning those firms cannot import any goods or services at all into the Chinese market.

What does that mean for Illumina? Using our Disclosures & Footnotes Query tool, we pulled up the company’s revenue footnote from its 2024 Form 10-K, filed on Feb. 12. Once there, you can see that Illumina reported $308 million in “Greater China revenue” for 2024. See Figure 1, below.

As you can see, that $308 million was roughly 7 percent of Illumina’s $4.37 billion in total revenue for the year. Clearly some portion of that is now in dire jeopardy, since Beijing is no longer allowing any Illumina imports into the country — but we don’t know precisely how much is at risk, because Illumina defines “Greater China” as mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

This is one challenge with geographic segment analysis: a company is free to define its geographic segments as it sees fit, so different companies define those regions in different ways. Some will report a single China segment; others will report a Greater China like Illumina does. Still more might report an “Asia-Pacific” segment that could include Japan, Korea, or any number of other Asia nations; and some companies might not report any geographic segments at all. 

That said, you can also use Calcbench to dig up more historical data and see that Illumina has been relying less on Greater China revenue for the last few years anyway. We dug up prior years’ segment disclosures and pulled together Figure 2, below, in about 90 seconds.

Two other quick points analysts might want to keep in mind. First, when a company suffers a direct hit in the trade wars — does that qualify as a material event worthy of an 8-K filing? We at Calcbench don’t know (we’re data providers, not securities lawyers) but Illumina hasn’t filed one so far today. Regardless, Calcbench users can always configure your email alerts to be notified whenever a company you follow does file an 8-K. 

Second, we can’t help but wonder: if tariffs and trade wars become a permanent fixture on the economic scene, might that prod some businesses to reconfigure their geographic market disclosures to offer more transparency into this issue? For example, will we see more companies disclose a dedicated “China” segment instead of Asia-Pacific, or reclassify a “North America” segment into Canada, the United States, and Mexico? 

That remains to be seen — but whatever happens, Calcbench will be tracking companies’ disclosures to help you understand it.

Our latest analysis captures data from more than 2,100 non-financial firms that had filed Q4 earnings releases by 3 p.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 28. Net income grew nearly 18 percent from the year-ago period, with revenue, capex spending, and Sales, General & Administrative costs all also a few points higher than they were for Q4 2023.

Figure 1, below, gives our final numbers for the quarter.

Some people might ask, “What about Nvidia? Didn’t they just report gobs and gobs of net income, and is that skewing net income growth for the whole?” That’s a fair question; NVidia ($NVDA) did report $9.8 billion in net income earlier this week, which is indeed an enormous sum. 

Still, the answer is no, Nvidia’s performance did not skew results to any unusual degree. Even if you exclude the AI chipmaker from our analysis, net income still stood at 15.9 percent higher than Q4 2023. 

That said, the Nvidia question does point to another, related issue: that impressive net income number is heavily tilted toward the largest firms in our sample group.

Specifically, the 50 firms with the biggest net income numbers account for 55 percent of all net income ($446.18 billion’s worth) in our sample of 2,140 non-financial firms. The remaining 45 percent is split among more than 2,000 smaller firms. 

To a certain extent, that’s to be expected; bigger firms generate more revenue and more net income. But the pattern is indeed quite lop-sided, and in a spot-check we noticed that many of those smaller firms actually reported net losses in Q4. It makes you wonder about the health of Corporate America overall. We’ll dig into the data and explore that issue more deeply in further posts next week. 

Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.

If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 

Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at info@calcbench.com.

Meanwhile, that’s all for Q4. The Earnings Tracker will now take a breather for six weeks, until mid-April rolls around and we can start looking at Q1 2025!