Monday, November 25, 2013

With most of our universe finished reporting for the third quarter, we decided to write a very quick 3rd quarter 2013 economic summary.  We first decided to eliminate financial firms from our initial analysis. Calcbench intends to publish a 3rd quarter financial sector summary separately in the next week or two.   

By using our normalized database, we took a look at four metrics:  Revenues, Cost of revenues, Capital Expenditures (Capex) and Cash (on the balance sheet).  We binned our universe into 3 groups by asset size.  Firms with assets greater than or equal to 3 billion USD were in one group (aka large), the 1 Billion to 3 billion group (mid size) and the firms with assets between 50M USD and 1 Billion (small). 

You will notice the negative sales growth figures from the third quarter 2013 versus the year ago third quarter.  Also notice that the average cost of revenue was decreasing faster than the sales growth leading to higher gross profits, on average.  All the while cash is increasing on the balance sheets!  Maybe more share buybacks are in order?

Also notice something that is troubling.  The Capital expenditures for mid to large companies are generally increasing, but the small companies are lagging.  In general this is not a good sign. 

All of this work was done using Calcbench’s normalized XBRL database that is available through a subscription.  For more email us@calcbench.com.

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