Wednesday, March 6, 2024

 Large U.S. businesses saw their revenue from China fall 4.7 percent in 2023, according to an analysis of their geographic segment disclosures. 


The Calcbench research team spent a day on our Segments disclosure database, poring over S&P 500 firms that report revenue from China. We found 52 firms that reported China revenue for both 2022 and 2023 — and collectively those revenues dropped from $246.26 billion in 2022 to $234.72 billion last year. 


Table 1, below, lists the 10 companies reporting the most China revenue for the last two years. Seven of them saw revenue declines from 2022 to 2023.



The picture didn’t look much better for all 52 firms, either. Thirty-four of them saw year-over-year declines in China revenue. The worst was Skyworks Solutions ($SWKS), which saw a drop of 40.2 percent. Close behind were Advanced Micro Devices ($AMD) at 34.4 percent and Micron Technology ($MU) at 34.1 percent. 


We’ve shared our spreadsheet of all 52 firms on DropBox if you’d like to see the complete list. 


Tracking China Disclosures


Calculating U.S. companies’ revenue from China is not easy; not all companies report revenue by geographic segments, and those that do report China revenues don’t alway report it in the same way. For example, some might report revenues for China alone, while others report a “China and Japan” segment. 


Calcbench users can use our Segments database to search for disclosures by geographic segment, then entering “China” as a filter. We did just that, and found more than a few S&P 500 companies do report some sort of China revenue. See Figure 1, below.



We found more than 100 companies with some sort of China revenue disclosure, but beware! Look at the listing for General Electric ($GE) in Figure 1. The segment in that line is actually Asia excluding China; GE had a separate segment (not shown above) for China specifically, which reported $3.9 billion in revenue. 


We also found some companies that reported China revenue in 2022, but not in 2023; and others that didn’t report China revenue in 2022 but started doing so last year. 


For example, Facebook ($META) reported $13.7 billion in China revenue for 2023, but had no China segment disclosure in 2022. On the other hand, Thermo Fisher ($TMO) reported $3.8 billion in China revenue in 2022, but in 2023 consolidated all international revenues into a single segment, so we don’t know what its 2023 China revenues were.
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