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!

Exhibit A this week: non-performing assets as a percentage of total assets — which, while small in absolute dollar numbers, are rising rather swiftly in relative terms. 

Figure 1, below, tells the tale. We pulled disclosures from the Q4 2024 earnings releases of 167 banks, and found that the percentage of non-performing assets was hovering at a three-year high at the end of last year.

The good news is that non-performing assets are still only 0.5 percent of total assets, a tiny fraction. Then again, that number is up from a low of 0.2 percent at the end of 2022. This means that the relative percentage has more than doubled in two years, which is a steep increase.

Of course, Figure 1 only depicts average numbers derived from a group of 167 banks. The numbers for individual banks might paint very different pictures. 

For example, Wells Fargo ($WFC) reported $7.94 billion of non-performing assets at the end of 2024, which was 0.87 percent of all Wells Fargo loans. Meanwhile, Triumph Financial ($TFIN) reported a non-performing assets ratio of 2.49 percent, down from 2.62 percent in the prior quarter but up from 1.65 percent from the year-earlier period.

Also remember that banks do report plenty of detail about their loan portfolio in the footnotes. For example, Bank of America breaks down its loans by consumer real estate, commercial real estate (which is then broken down into yet more categories), credit card loans, and other loan types. Then BofA reports loans in arrears by 30, 60, and 90 or more days past due, for each category. See Figure 2, below.

You have to squint to see the numbers as reported in the above footnote (it’s titled “Outstanding Loans and Leases and Allowance for Credit Losses,” and most banks will title their footnote something like that), but you can also pull out the numbers using our Export Data Tables feature or searching by XBRL tag. As always, Calcbench offers several ways for you to find and study the data you want.

One number that caught our eye was Walmart’s quarterly revenue, which clocked in at $173.4 billion. That’s impressive, but it’s also a shade lower than quarterly revenue at rival retail giant Amazon.com ($AMZN), which reported $187.8 billion for its most recent quarter. 

But wait! Is it really fair to compare Walmart and Amazon like that? After all, Amazon has a significant operating segment that has nothing to do with consumer commerce: Amazon Web Services, an IT hosting platform that Amazon sells as a service to other companies. Walmart doesn’t have a comparable line of business. 

So if we want to compare the brick-and-mortar world of Walmart against the e-commerce world of Amazon, how can we do that? 

Actually, in Calcbench it’s not that hard. Our databases track segment-level disclosures that companies make — and since Amazon reports AWS as its own operating segment, you can (a) identify AWS revenue and operating expenses; (b) subtract those numbers from Amazon’s total revenue and opex; and (c) arrive at a number that depicts Amazon’s e-commerce operations only, which you can then compare to Walmart.

For example, Figure 1, below, compares quarterly revenue between Walmart and Amazon’s global e-commerce revenue (basically, everything except the AWS segment) for the last three years. 

Now we can see that Amazon’s e-commerce performance is closing in on Walmart’s revenue numbers — but it hasn’t surpassed the Arkansas giant yet. 

Next question: what about operating income? After all, Walmart and Amazon might seem roughly equal in revenue dollars, but the two companies have radically different operations. 

Well, you can answer that question in Calcbench too. Amazon reports three operating segments: North America, International, and AWS. For each of those segments, the company also discloses revenue and operating income.

So by using our Export Data Tables feature and doing a bit of math, we were able to add up the revenue and operating income for Amazon’s e-commerce operations (that is, the North America and International segments), and then calculate operating margin for those e-commerce operations. 

Meanwhile, Walmart’s operating segments are all about retail operations anyway, so calculating its operating margins is a breeze: just track the company’s total revenue and total operating income.

That’s how we arrived at Figure 2, below.

Hmmm. That chart allows you to ask some really interesting questions. For example, why did Amazon run a negative operating margin in 2022? That was a year of inflation and massive hiring in the tech sector — so to what extent did those forces pressure operating expenses in the e-commerce division? How has Amazon returned to growing operating margins since then? 

Or consider Walmart, largest business on the planet: its operating margins have been positive (good), but they’ve also held remarkably steady over the last three years. That insight allows financial analysts to ponder more precise questions about how Walmart will navigate 2025 (where, remember, the company just posted lower earnings guidance) and fend off rivals such as Amazon — or all the other brick-and-mortar retailers out there, many of which haven’t even filed their latest quarterly reports yet. 

Our point here is simply that headline numbers in an earnings release or on the primary financial statements rarely tell the whole picture — but the data is there, tucked away in the footnotes. Yes, you need to pull that data out of the footnotes so that you can see what it tells you; but with the right technology platform, no, it’s not that hard to do.

For those who haven’t paid attention to MicroStrategy's journey until now (oh, how we envy you), once upon a time the company had been a developer of business analytics software. In 2020, however, CEO Michael Saylor boldly announced that from then forward, MicroStrategy’s main line of business would be buying and holding bitcoin. That August, the company dropped $248.9 million to buy 21,454 bitcoin.

MicroStrategy has kept on that path ever since, issuing bonds and then using the cash to buy ever more bitcoin. Those holdings have also increased in value on a per BTC basis, including an astonishing price run that began immediately after the 2024 election and continues to this day.

The result is Figure 1, below, which charts out MicroStrategy’s total assets by bitcoin holdings and all other assets. 

Yowza, that’s a lot of value. For comparison purposes, MicroStrategy’s total bitcoin holdings were worth $6.85 billion at the end of September 2024 — and then soared another $17.06 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, to end the year with a total value of $23.91 billion.

Tucked within the MicroStrategy 10-K you can see where all that increase in value came from. The company includes a “Digital Assets” footnote which discloses the number of bitcoins held at the end of each period and their assessed value. See Figure 2, below.

As you can see, MicroStrategy does sometimes sell bitcoin, but only rarely. That made us wonder: how do they pay the bills while buying all those bitcoin? So we also looked at the company’s Segments footnote to see whether that rump business of selling software still turns enough profit to keep the lights on.

Answer: yes, MicroStrategy’s operating business still does turn a respectable profit. The company includes a somewhat off-beat income report in the Segment footnote, where you can see the operating unit’s performance pulled out from the bitcoin holdings. See Figure 3, below.

MicroStrategy had $463.4 million in operating revenue in 2024, which ultimately had net income of $175 million. Those numbers, however, are overshadowed by the digital assets division, which includes a $1.79 billion impairment charge; when you add both divisions together for one consolidated net income number, the profit from the operating division gets lost in the gloom.

An important point here is that if you only look at the primary income statement, you won’t see that net income from the operating side. You’ll see the $463.4 million revenue number at the top, and the $1.16 billion net loss at the bottom, but you’d need to do your own arithmetic to back out the $1.79 billion impairment charge and understand that the operating side did quite decently in 2024. 

Or you could just use Calcbench and dig into the footnotes with our Disclosures & Footnotes tool, because we always have your back — and the data you need.

This week’s analysis captures data from more than 1,000 non-financial firms that had filed Q4 earnings releases by 10 a.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 14. Net income continues to show double-digit growth from the year-ago period, but not quite as high as our numbers from last week. Total capex spending also fell, while cost of revenue and Sales, General & Administrative costs are now both higher than they were for Q4 2023.

Figure 1, below, tells the tale.

This is the first week we’ve seen cost of revenue and SG&A expenses now higher than they were in the year-ago period. Then again, our first two weeks of Q4 earnings analysis only tracked a relatively small number of large firms; this is the first week we’ve started to get data from a significant number of smaller firms. 

So will this week’s shift to higher costs endure as even more filers submit data in the next few weeks? We shall see. 

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.

We’ll continue to update our earnings tracker at the end of every week for the next few weeks, as quarterly reports flood into the database. 

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.

She had been picking apart Amazon.com’s latest quarterly report, and noted that the e-commerce giant had revised the useful life of certain servers and networking equipment downward from six to five years. That change, Usvyatsky noted, will have the practical effect of reducing 2025 operating income by $700 million. Moreover, Amazon ($AMZN) also decided to retire some equipment early; that led to $920 million in accelerated depreciation in Q4 2024 and will reduce 2025 operating income by another $600 million.

Wait a minute. The useful life of computer servers, why does that sound familiar… 

Because Calcbench wrote about that exact issue in 2021! 

Back then, we noted that Google ($GOOG) and Microsoft ($MSFT) had both extended the estimated life of their computer servers from three years to four, which had the result of increasing net income at both companies by several hundred million dollars. Now we’re seeing the opposite effect.

OK, but why is Amazon trimming the estimated life of its servers? Consider this excerpt from the company’s 10-K:

“These … changes above are due to an increased pace of technology development, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

That is, the fast-evolving demands of AI are forcing Amazon to de-commission old servers that can’t keep up with the huge computing power required for AI. Fascinating, because that’s just about the opposite of what everyone expected several years ago when they were extending server life. Then came generative AI in 2022, and the world changed. 

Our point: even seemingly small changes in accounting policy can lead to big changes in corporate earnings. The data to sniff out such changes is there; you just need to know what to look for. 

Calcbench has the data. Usvyatsky’s analysis is a great example of how you could put that data to work, to understand why a company might be changing up its accounting policies and what the larger implications might be for peer companies you follow.

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.

At close of business on Friday, Feb. 7, we had Q4 filings for more than 700 non-financial firms. Revenue was up 3.11 percent, but net income popped an impressive 17.6 percent compared to the end of 2023. See Figure 1, below.

One nice data point is the cost of revenue, which is down 3.2 percent from the year-ago period. That tracks with our first Q4 earnings update last week, which reported a 3.94 percent decline — but that first week tracked only about 120 large firms, and wasn’t necessarily reflective of trends for all filers. Now we have 700+ firms from a wide range of industries, and are getting closer to trends reflective of all filers. Cost of revenue is still going down. For anyone still scarred by the inflation spike of two years ago, you can continue to breathe easier. 

Also note that Sales, General & Administrative expenses are down 1.8 percent. That could be reflective of lower payroll costs, or lower costs for items such as shipping, office supplies, utilities, or other overhead. Whatever the specifics, SG&A costs are down. CFOs won’t complain about that. 

Calcbench will continue to update our earnings tracker at the end of every week for the next few weeks, as quarterly reports flood into the database. 

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.