The implication is this: the law includes a provision that will allow companies to deduct more of interest expenses they incur from taxable corporate income, which in turn will goose earnings per share upward. And while the deduction is structured in a way that’s likely to be particularly helpful to small companies, Calcbench has developed a template so that financial analysts can quickly estimate the benefit for any public filer. 

Under pre-existing tax rules, companies were allowed to deduct interest expense for interest that was as much as 30 percent — but not more — of earnings before interest and tax, otherwise known as EBIT. The One Big Beautiful Bill, however, says that deduction can now equal 30 percent of EBIT plus depreciation and amortization, commonly known as EBITDA. 

EBITDA is always going to be larger than EBIT, so therefore the total possible tax deduction is going to be larger too. Which means a larger uplift to corporate earnings. 

This newly expanded deduction can boost the earnings of any company, although smaller firms are likely to benefit more because they tend to have relatively larger amounts of depreciation and amortization than their large-cap brethren. That is, EBITDA isn’t just larger than EBIT for small firms; it tends to be considerably larger, so more interest expense is eligible for the new tax credit. (Barron’s has an article taking a deep dive into the issue if you want more detail.) 

Anyway, back to our template. Calcbench premium subscribers can download the template from DropBox and then enter the ticker of companies you follow to see whether that company can benefit from this new tax benefit. (The template will only work if you are a premium subscriber and use our Excel Add-In. If you need help with either of those, let us know at us@calcbench.com.) 

For example, Figure 1 below shows the results for Fidelity National Information Services ($FIS). Its EBIT for 2024 was $790 million, but its EBITDA was nearly $2.53 billion. That means its interest expense goes from 52 percent of EBIT to 16 percent of EBITDA — therefore yes, it stands to benefit from this new deduction.

Now let’s get to the good stuff: Which companies might stand to benefit the most from this deduction? 

We sifted through S&P 500 firms, looking for non-financial companies with large depreciation and amortization costs, and found several dozen who would see their interest expense ratio decline sharply once you add the DA to the EBIT. Figure 2, below, shows the 10 firms with the largest impact to interest expense and therefore to the EBITDA ratio. 

So these 10 firms (plus many more) would now be able to claim a larger tax deduction thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, which in turn will help to improve earnings. 

You can use our template to research other companies and how they’ll benefit, too. It’s all there in the data, and Calcbench brings it to you. 

Will this deadline stick? We don’t know. Will that 25 percent tariff rate endure? See previous statement. 

But Calcbench can help financial analysts get at least some sense of U.S. corporations’ exposure to retaliatory tariffs, by tallying up revenues that U.S. firms report from the Japanese market.

We simply visited our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page, pulled up the geographic segments reported by the S&P 500, and filtered the results by the word “Japan.” 

Table 1, below, shows the 10 firms with the greatest percentage of 2024 revenue coming from the Japanese market. 

On the other hand, we could also rank firms by their Japan revenue in absolute dollar terms. That gives us Table 2,  below. 

As we’ve warned before, analyzing geographic segment disclosures is an inexact science because not all firms define their geographic segments in the same way. For example, all the firms above do report a segment defined as “Japan” — but other companies might report a segment called “Asia-Pacific” that includes Japan, along with other countries. Some might include China in Asia-Pacific; others might report the two regions separately.

Still, we can say that these S&P 500 firms (we identified 35 in total, including the firms above) do report large Japan segments that account for a material portion of total revenue. 

Calcbench subscribers can run the same sort of analysis on any number of countries or trading blocs: China, Mexico, Europe, and so forth. It’s another level of detail that can help analysts understand a company’s financial performance and earnings potential, made possible through Calcbench.

For those not yet in the know, Calcbench released our annual analysis of non-GAAP adjustments to net income earlier this week. The report, done in conjunction with Suffolk University, researches the number and type of non-GAAP adjustments to net income that companies among the S&P 500 make to their annual earnings. 

In our first post about this year’s report, we reviewed key findings and the overall volume of non-GAAP adjustments; in our second, we examined how the various categories of adjustment have changed over time. 

So now let’s get to the good stuff: which specific companies reported the largest non-GAAP adjustments. We have a table — in fact, we have several!

Table 1, below, lists the 10 companies with the largest upward adjustments to net income.

Some companies on Table 1 reported multiple specific adjustments. For example, Broadcom ($AVGO) reported an adjustment for amortization of intangibles worth $9.27 billion, as well as an adjustment for stock-based compensation worth $5.67 billion; plus assorted smaller adjustments that altogether equal the $17.84 billion in the table above.

We should also note that most companies reported non-GAAP net income that was higher than “traditional” GAAP net income, but that wasn’t always the case. Table 2, below, shows the five firms with the largest downward non-GAAP adjustments to net income.

Why might a company adjust its net income in a way that leads to a lower number? For any number of reasons, really, such as an unusually large tax item or a divestiture charge. Rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission only specify that companies reporting non-GAAP net income do so consistently from one quarter to the next; you can’t change up your calculations from one period to the next so that you always end up with a higher number. 

Non-GAAP Adjustments by Industry

Our report also examined non-GAAP adjustments by industry, according to companies’ SIC codes. Every public company has one, and the first digital denotes the broad industry category for the firm:

• 0 - Agriculture

• 1 - Mining and Construction

• 2, 3 - Manufacturing

• 4 - Transportation and public utilities

• 5 - Wholesale and retail trade

• 6 - Finance, insurance, real estate

• 7, 8 - Services

• 9 - Public administration

Adjustments vary greatly among industries in both their magnitude and type. For example, adjustments made by companies in the manufacturing sector (codes 2 and 3) accounted for 60 percent of all adjustments made, but those manufacturing companies comprised only 49 percent of all firms in our sample group. Manufacturing firms also adjusted their GAAP net income upward by an average of 31 percent, while those in wholesale and retail trade (code 5) had an average upward adjustment of 47 percent.

The heat map in Figure 3, below, shows the different categories of adjustments as a percentage of total adjustment amounts for each industry. This allows us to see which are the most significant categories of adjustments for each industry. 

You can download the full Non-GAAP Adjustments report from our Research page, which has lots more information than what we’ve shown here. If you’re looking for each industry’s major adjustment category (either by dollar amount or frequency), or for the largest individual companies making adjustments in each of the 11 non-GAAP categories we tracked, then download the full report ASAP!

That report, done in conjunction with Suffolk University, researches the number and type of non-GAAP adjustments to net income that companies among the S&P 500 make to their annual earnings. In a previous post about this year’s report, we reviewed our key findings and the overall volume of non-GAAP adjustments: 2,249 individual adjustments in 2024, worth a total of $304 billion.

Today we want to look at non-GAAP adjustments from another angle: which categories of non-GAAP adjustment are most common and which ones involve the most dollars? 

Our report classifies all earnings adjustments into 1 of 11 categories, listed below. (Foreign currency adjustments are a new category added this year.)

Let’s first look at the distribution of adjustment categories by size — that is, the mix of how much each category accounted for the total dollar value of non-GAAP adjustments. Figure 1, below, shows the distribution of adjustment categories by size for 2024. It’s the “Percent of total” column, second from right.

As you can see, amortization of intangibles accounted for 31 percent of the total non-GAAP adjustments in 2024, restructuring costs were worth 18.7 percent, and impairments were worth 17.4 percent. 

That’s interesting unto itself, but the distribution of adjustment categories has changed over time. Figure 2, below, shows how that distribution has changed over the last three years.

For example, notice that amortization of intangible assets has been one of the largest categories for three years running, while impairments went from 35 percent of the total in 2022 to only 17.4 percent in 2024. Restructuring costs popped from 11 percent of the total in 2023 to nearly 19 percent in 2024. 

Why? Calcbench can’t say for certain. Macro-economic factors might account for some changes. For example, robust stock market performance in 2023 and 2024 made stock-based compensation more expensive under GAAP; that could explain the steady upward march in the size of stock-based pay adjustments since 2022. 

On the other hand, amortization of intangibles follows a fixed schedule under GAAP, regardless of macro-economic trends. So it’s not surprising to see that amortization adjustments are large (because intangible assets are a significant portion of many companies’ balance sheets) and tend to rank among the largest of all 11 categories every year.

Distribution of Adjustment Categories by Frequency 

We can also look at the distribution of adjustment categories by frequency: the percentage of companies claiming a certain category of adjustment, rather than that category’s dollar value. As seen in Figure 3, below, this paints a rather different picture.

Here we can see that the portion of adjustments has held relatively steady in some categories, such as amortization, tax adjustments, and gains or losses on investments. That makes sense; those categories are items that many companies tend to make year in and year out, regardless of broader economic trends. 

On the other hand, notice the jump in restructuring adjustments, from less than 10 percent of all adjustments in 2022 to 15 percent of all adjustments in 2024. And if you go back to Figure 2, you can also see that restructuring costs went from 11 percent of all dollars adjusted in 2023 to 19 percent in 2024. 

That could be due to more companies launching restructuring programs last year. If the economy sputters in 2025, presumably that will lead to even more restructuring efforts — and therefore more restructuring adjustments — in next year’s report.

That’s why an understanding of non-GAAP net income is so useful to financial analysis. It can help you perceive broad trends in economic performance that might not align with the fixed and traditional world of GAAP reporting rules, and give you a better window into management’s thinking.

You can download the full Non-GAAP Adjustments report from our Research page. Later this week we’ll continue our exploration of the report with a look at industries and companies with lots of non-GAAP adjustment activity.

We start with a quick comparison of the two tech giants’ earnings for 2024, which they both filed last summer. (That’s an important detail, we promise.) See Figure 1, below. 

We can start by stating the obvious: Oracle reports adjusted, non-GAAP net income, while Microsoft doesn’t.

But what if Microsoft did report non-GAAP net income? Or more precisely, what if we could estimate Microsoft’s non-GAAP net income in comparison to Oracle? 

Actually you can estimate the non-GAAP net income of Microsoft, because Microsoft does report all the same expenses as Oracle; it just doesn’t report them as non-GAAP adjustments. But finding those expenses and modeling out what Microsoft’s adjusted net income could be is a breeze.

Figure 2, below, starts us on that journey. We added all of Oracle’s non-GAAP adjustments so you can see how the firm got from $10.47 billion in GAAP net income to $15.7 billion in adjusted net income. The adjustments themselves are all listed in Oracle’s earnings release for its fiscal 2024.

The next step is to find those same non-GAAP items for Microsoft — which isn’t hard to do, if you use Calcbench and know where to look.

For example, you can find the costs of a company’s stock-based compensation on its statement of cash flows. You can find amortization of intangibles in the footnote disclosures, and tax effects as well. Just about any non-GAAP adjustment you see some companies make in the earnings release, that same item exists somewhere in the footnotes for all companies, even if a company decides not to report that item as a non-GAAP adjustment.

Running Some Non-GAAP Numbers

So we dug through Microsoft’s footnote disclosures, found two comparable non-GAAP items: stock-based compensation and amortization of intangibles. If you add those items back to Microsoft’s 2024 GAAP net income, you arrive at a hypothetical non-GAAP net income comparison that would look something like what we have in Figure 3, below. 

This comparison isn’t completely perfect. For example, you’ll notice that we struck a few of Oracle’s non-GAAP adjustments on restructuring, acquisitions, and tax costs (which weren’t easily discerned from Microsoft’s disclosures) so that we could maintain an apples-to-apples comparison. Then again, this is non-GAAP reporting; you’re allowed to do that, so long as your logic is clear and consistent. 

Anyway, these calculations show us that Microsoft is more profitable whether we’re talking GAAP net income (see Figure 1, above) or the modified non-GAAP net income we just cooked up for Figure 3. 

One point to note is that these are last year’s numbers. Oracle has already filed its fiscal 2025 financial results earlier in June, and Microsoft will file its next annual report in mid-July. What would the comparisons look like with fresh numbers? We don’t know, but we’ll mark our calendars to find out.

Meanwhile, it’s also worth noting that Oracle stock is up about 43.7 percent over the last year, while Microsoft is up only 7 percent. Does that square with the higher GAAP and modified non-GAAP margins we calculated above? You tell us.

Our data point du jour: the backlog of homes Lennar is scheduled to build.

Lennar discloses that metric in its earnings release. For its most recent quarter, ending May 28, Lennar reported a backlog of 15,538 homes waiting to be built, with a total value of $6.5 billion.

From there, we simply used our See Tag History feature to chart Lennar’s quarterly backlog for the last several years. In less than two minutes, we ended up with Figure 1, below.

Fascinating, but also entirely predictable when you think about it. Demand for homes surged in the early 2020s while interest rates were at rock-bottom levels, but supply-chain disruptions thanks to the pandemic clogged construction operations at the same time. Hence we see that bulge in 2022, which Lennar has been working through ever since.

Figure 1, however, got us thinking — have other homebuilders seen a similar bulge and decline? 

So we ran the same exercise for KB Home ($KBH), and found that the answer is yes. See Figure 2, below, which took us another two minutes to compile.

KB Home is only about one-fifth the size of Lennar when measured by revenue: $6.9 billion in 2024 for KB compared to $35.4 billion for Lennar, and that ratio has held roughly steady for the last several years. 

Still, the bulge-and-decline pattern is clear for both firms. 

Analysts could posit a few questions from the data above. For example, while Lennar has a larger backlog, it seems to be burning through that backlog at a faster rate than KB Home. (Note the trend lines, where Lennar’s trend line clearly has a greater downward slope than KB Home’s.) 

So what’s the plan when backlog returns to some sort of “normal” amount? What is that normal amount, anyway, in today’s topsy-turvy housing market? The supply of housing in the United States is still several million units short, so will backlog continue? What if interest rates fall? What if they don’t? 

And so forth and so on. Calcbench doesn’t know the answer to these questions, but we do bring you the data so that you can ask them, and get better, more precise answers, more quickly.

Figure 1, below, tells the tale. It charts total restaurant locations for two dozen restaurant businesses for the last eight quarters, grouped into fast-food (blue line) and sit-down (red line) categories. Note the precipitous plunge for sit-down restaurants in the first quarter of this year. (The number of sit-down locations is listed on the right-side axis.)

The restaurant companies in our sit-down category include  Cava ($CAVA), Dave & Busters ($PLAY) and Darden Restaurants ($DRI), which operates the Olive Garden, Capital Grille; among others. 

Long story short, the number of sit-down locations has see-sawed in a relatively narrow band for the last two years: from 12,041 in early 2023, to a peak of 12,269 at the end of 2024, and then a drop down to 12,154 in early 2025. 

For those who don’t want to squint to see the numbers on the vertical axes, here is the same information displayed in a table.

The obvious question now is why sit-down restaurants had an appreciable decline in store locations at the start of this year. Perhaps the root cause is some cyclical rhythm of the restaurant world; maybe it’s driven by macro-economic factors such as greater economic uncertainty spooking people to save money by eating at home. 

Calcbench is just the data supplier, so we don’t know — but we do have that data, readily available for subscribers to pull out and analyze. Then you can answer those questions more quickly, accurately, and easily.

To find this information yourself, just find the restaurant company you want to research, pull up its earnings release, and look for the data point on stores in operation (or stores opened and closed, which some firms also report). Then you can use our Earnings Model feature or our See Tag History feature to chart that data point through previous filings.

You can also chart store data for multiple companies at once. For example, you can use our Bulk Data Query page to dig up store closures for large groups; just scroll down to the “Footnote Points” section, where you’ll see a section that tracks data specific to retail businesses. Expand that and you’ll see the option to track number of stores. 

If any readers out there have suggestions for other industry-specific research we should do, drop us a line at us@calcbench.com any time. We’re always happy to help a client dig into the data!

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. Indeed, none of the 12 major financial metrics the Calcbench Earnings Tracker follows were negative for the quarter. Can’t complain about that. 

The one point we’ve been following is the relatively close gap between revenue, up 4.2 percent from last year, and cost of revenue, up 3.4 percent. That spread is slightly wider than our previous look at earnings a few weeks ago, but it’s still not terribly wide. 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.

Meanwhile, cash is up 1.4 percent from the year-ago period. That’s a wider margin than from a few weeks ago, but more cash is always better, especially if you’re spooked about the chance of recession. 

Also note the 16.7 percent jump in net income. that 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 16.7 percent.

Balance Sheets Stronger

We also continue to be fascinated by the overall balance sheet of corporations these days, which continues to get stronger. 

In this final Q1 update, collective book value (total assets minus total liabilities) was 8.6 percent higher than one year ago. See Figure 2, below. 

So even though lots of individual firms might 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 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. (Note that the link will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription — and really, who doesn’t, when swift access to real-time data is so important? — contact us at info@calcbench.com.)

That’s all for first-quarter 2025. The Earnings Tracker will now be on vacation until mid-July, when we start cranking up the data on Q2.

Publicly traded restaurant companies do report their total number of restaurants each quarter in their earnings releases. This means Calcbench can collect and crunch those numbers with just a few keystrokes, which is what we did one afternoon after rolling ourselves back to the office from a calorie-laden lunch.

Figure 1, below, charts total restaurant locations for two dozen restaurant businesses for the last eight quarters, grouped into fast-food (blue line) and sit-down (red line) categories. 

For those who can’t squint enough to see the numbers on the vertical axes, here is the same information displayed in a table. (As you can see, we are still waiting for enough Q1 data from the sit-down restaurants to add that component to the chart and table.)

Our sample includes numerous big names in fast food, such as McDonalds ($MCD) and Jack in the Box ($JACK); as well as sit-down restaurants like Cava ($CAVA) and Darden Restaurants ($DRI), which operates the Olive Garden, Capital Grille, and others. 

What’s the use in knowing this? Lots. For starters, you can drill deeper into individual data of restaurant companies to see how many stores they’re opening or closing. Larger restaurant businesses will even report the number of stores by specific brand. See Figure 2, below, showing recent changes for 10 brands operated by Darden.

Knowing the total number of restaurants can also sharpen your balance sheet analysis, since many restaurants will be leased space, appearing on the balance sheet as a right-of-use asset. Restaurants owned by the business will appear under the Property, Plant & Equipment line.

Calcbench users can find this information yourselves quite easily. Just find the restaurant company you want to research, pull up its earnings release, and look for the data point on stores in operation (or stores opened and closed, which some firms also report). Then you can use our Earnings Model feature or our See Tag History feature to chart that data point through previous filings.

You can also chart store data for multiple companies at once. For example, you can use our Bulk Data Query page to dig up store closures for large groups; just scroll down to the “Footnote Points” section, where you’ll see a section that tracks data specific to retail businesses. Expand that and you’ll see the option to track number of stores. 

If any readers out there have suggestions for other industry-specific research we should do, drop us a line at us@calcbench.com any time. We’re always happy to help a client dig into the data!

For those financial analysts not among the fashion-forward (which includes all the men on the Calcbench team), Urban Outfitters operates under five separate brands:

• Its namesake Urban Outfitters, selling to both men and women;

• Anthropologie, selling primarily to women;

• Free People, selling to a younger female demographic;

• Nuuly, a rent-to-wear subscription service;

• Menus and Venues, a small restaurant and catering business. 

The important point for financial analysts is that Urban Outfitters reports quarterly sales by each brand. So when we saw Urban’s latest report on our Recent Filings page, we used the Calcbench Earnings Model feature to view those brand-level revenue numbers at a quick glance. See Figure 1, below.

Even better, we used that Earnings Model page to pull up prior quarters’ brand-level disclosures too. Within a few minutes we had charted out quarterly brand-level sales for the last two years. See Figure 2, below.

OK, that immediately lets us see that Anthropologie is the flagship brand for Urban Outfitters; but the rest of the brands are tough to distinguish at this high level of detail. Except, when you have the raw data — which is what Calcbench provides, in spades — you can always use Excel or some similar tool to reframe the data so that insights become more clear.

We did exactly that, using Excel to display all five brands as a percentage of each quarter’s total sales. That led us to Figure 3, below.

Now we can see one trend immediately: that Nuuly, Urban’s subscription clothing service (seen in green above), is small but growing rapidly. Sales in the most recent quarter were 9.3 percent of total revenue ($123.5 million against $1.33 billion), versus only 6.5 percent in the year-earlier period ($77.9 million against $1.2 billion). Moreover, that growth in Nuuly seems to be coming at the expense of the Urban Outfitters brand (seen in yellow above). 

We could keep going. Since Urban Outfitters also reports revenue by individual channel (wholesale, retail, and subscription), we can also chart out the mix of channels to total revenue, too. See Figure 4. 

Retail is king; no surprise there. But with a few more keystrokes, analysts who follow Urban Outfitters (and other fashion outlets) could also compare Urban’s revenue patterns against peers. For example, Ralph Lauren Corp. ($RL) filed its latest earnings report last week too, and discloses revenue by segment. The Gap ($GAP) reports revenue by store brand (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Atheleta). 

The exact segment-level disclosures will vary from one retailer to the next depending on each one’s business model, but in almost every instance you’ll be able to find some comparable metric in the earnings release somewhere. All you need is Calcbench to help you dig out the data quickly, easily, and precisely.

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.