Calcbench

Earlier this week we had a post about Oracle’s ($ORCL) exposure to off-balance sheet leasing commitments , and particularly how those amounts have soared to an eye-popping $99.8 billion in recent months — none of it included on Oracle’s balance sheet. That post made us wonder: what other companies have similar off-balance sheet arrangements, and in what amounts?  Typically that information is hard to find. Analysts need to sift through a company’s quarterly report, and the number is usually buried away at the bottom of a page somewhere in a footnote near the end of the filing. That’s how Oracle disclosed its $99.8 billion, for example.  Thankfully, Calcbench can help you leapfrog all that work to get to the good stuff. All those off-balance sheet disclosures are also tagged in XBRL. So if you just search by XBRL tag — which Calcbench lets you do — the numbers pop up quickly and easily. The exact tag is:  "UnrecordedUnconditionalPurchaseObligationBalanceSheetAmount" We se...

You may have seen the Financial Times’ excellent article the other day analyzing Oracle ($ORCL), picking apart the tech giant’s exposure to OpenAI and the many ways that mammoth deal might turn sour for Oracle. Or maybe you already knew Oracle’s potential risk here because you’ve been studying those same disclosures yourself — disclosures that are all readily available in Calcbench. Don’t get us wrong; we appreciate the FT’s article, which is packed with good points and insight. But consider the key metrics that the article cites: Segment-level revenues Debt levels Cash and short-term investments as a percent of total assets Free cash flow Leases Debt-to-equity ratio Calcbench tracks all those metrics for public filers . So if you had wanted to run your own analysis of Oracle’s exposure to OpenAI, perhaps comparing that exposure to other AI “hyperscalers” such as Microsoft ($MSFT), Google ($GOOG), and Amazon ($AMZN) — well, we’ve had all that data all along, there for the picking. ...

We are now deep into Q3 earnings season, with only a few big corporate names still outstanding. (Nvidia and Walmart, for example, both file next week.) So even though we now have nearly 3,000 non-financial companies in our sample, overall earnings growth this week hews closely to what we saw last week .   The numbers are in Figure 1, below. Net income growth is up 18.6 percent from the year-ago period (up just a tad from last week), operating income is up 10.5 percent (down two tads’ worth from last week), and revenue is up 6.4 percent (essentially flat from last week).  Capex is up 11.1 percent from the year-earlier period. That’s down a few points from the 13.7 percent increase we reported last week — but more to the point, it’s down sharply from the 27.7 percent increase we reported two weeks ago .  For now, at least, the growth picture has stabilized. It might change again next week when Nvidia ($NDVA) and Walmart ($WMT) enter the chat; we’ll have to stay tuned....

You may have seen articles in the mainstream business press lately questioning the strength of the AI investment boom . Are AI pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic making any money? If they’re not, do we know how much money they’re losing? And are those losses showing up on the books of other tech companies, that financial analysts could get a better sense of the true picture here?  As always, Calcbench is on the case.  Let’s start with Microsoft ($MSFT), which has been investing in OpenAI for years, primarily via cloud computing resources Microsoft provides to the generative AI startup. In its quarterly report from Oct. 29 , Microsoft reported a $4.1 billion loss from those investments, up from a $688 million loss in the year-earlier period. See Figure 1, below. We were intrigued. If Microsoft is reporting a $4.1 billion loss on OpenAI today and a $688 million loss one year ago, what other losses has it disclosed related to OpenAI in the past?  Alas, we can’t really tell. ...