Welcome back to earnings season, everyone! The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker has nearly 150 Q4 2025 earnings reports in the hopper — not a large number, but big enough for us to fire up the analysis engine running again.

At midday on Friday, Jan. 23, we were tracking data from 149 non-financial firms that have already filed their Q4 2025 reports. Collectively, that group reported net income 2 percent lower than what they reported one year ago, although operating income was up 23.1 percent and revenue was up 5.9 percent. 

Huh, wait a minute. If revenue is up a decent amount and operating income is up by more than 20 percent, but net income has declined, doesn’t that imply some big expense further down the income statement related to taxes or restructuring charges or something like that? 

Indeed it does, and indeed that has happened. See Figure 1, below. 

We have a huge spike in tax provisions (up 205.1 percent) and an impressive jump in restructuring costs, too (up 48.5 percent). 

That tax spike, however, is almost entirely due to a statistical quirk from one company, Abbott Labs ($ABT). Abbott received a $7.2 billion tax credit in the year-ago period, which declined to a $582 million credit in Q4. Technically that results in a $6.6 billion “increase” in tax provision for Abbott, which skews the number for the whole sample. If you exclude Abbott and its weirdness, tax payments actually fell by nearly 22 percent. 

To that end, we did recalculate everything with the tax column excluded. The result is Figure 2, below. 

Second, these early filers tend to be large companies, with more sturdy and robust financial fundamentals than smaller ones. The smaller folks won’t start to file until mid-February, and the big picture we start to see then might look very different from the glimpse portrayed by the biggest of filers now. 

Figure 3, below, shows the data again in table format.

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 this week. Come back next Friday for more!