As usual, we start with a snapshot of results compared to the year-ago period. Figure 1, below, shows revenue up 16 percent, operating income up 35 percent, cash up 14.9 percent, and net income up a whopping 62.8 percent.

Except, as we’ve said all earnings season long, that net income growth number is somewhat deceptive, because it’s driven by a small number of tech giants reporting staggering amounts of net income growth.

First was Alphabet ($GOOG), which reported an astonishing $112.2 billion in quarterly net income — but $97.8 billion of that number came from Google revaluing the 6 percent of SpaceX ($SPCX) shares that it owns. That one-time item alone (not even including the rest of Google’s net income!) accounts for 13 percent of all net income among the 3,600 companies we’ve been tracking this quarter.

Or consider the net income of Google, Nvidia, Meta ($META), and Microsoft ($MSFT). Those four firms alone reported $223.53 billion in net income altogether. That is 29.6 percent of all net income for our entire sample group ($755.33 billion).

If you strip just those four tech giants from our analysis, then net income growth for the other 3,600-ish firms was only 14.6 percent, not the 62.8 percent we see above.

We see similar trends in other important line items. For example, earlier this week we had a blog post examining capital expenditure spending. According to Figure 1, above, capex has risen 23.1 percent from the year-ago period — but that number includes the AI hyperscalers spending gobs of money on data centers. If you exclude those six hyperscaler firms, capex for everyone else only grew 6.3 percent.

This is why it pays to dive deeply into the data. Calcbench, of course, has all the data you need, indexed and structured and ready for solid analysis within minutes of companies filing that data with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Meanwhile, as always, we also have the data from Figure 1 in table format instead.

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 us@calcbench.com.

That’s all for Q2 earnings. Everyone enjoy the end of summer, and the Earnings Tracker will join us again in early October as we start to examine Q3!