Calcbench

Today we return to tariffs, which continue to be a vexing issue for companies and financial analysts alike. What are companies paying for tariffs? How much are tariffs squeezing margins? How much money might companies recoup from tariff refunds, if any at all?  Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble ($PG) provided a fascinating example of what companies are disclosing in its latest quarterly report, filed on April 24 . In the Management Discussion & Analysis section, tucked away on Page 19, of the filing, Procter & Gamble disclosed that gross margin decreased 150 basis points to 49.5 percent of net sales for the quarter. Then came a long list of bullet points for why gross margins were getting squeezed (emphasis ours): 180 basis points of decline from unfavorable product mix, 100 basis points of product and packaging investments,  50 basis points of higher restructuring costs, 50 basis points of higher costs from tariffs, 20 basis points of other items and round...

Several major apparel brands filed their latest earnings reports the other day. Sure, we could do the usual look at their year-over-year revenue and earnings — but Calcbench data can do much more than that! So we instead decided to look at the firms’ liquidity metrics, specifically their cash conversion cycles. The “CCC” lets analysts understand how well a company manages its inventory, collections, and payments; which is an important metric to know if you follow the apparel business. You calculate the Cash Conversion Cycle by manipulating a few other liquidity metrics. First, add together the company’s Days Inventory Outstanding (DIO) and Days Sales Outstanding (DSO); then subtract its Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) from that sum.  Or if you’re a Calcbench subscriber, you just let us do all that for you and provide the CCC number automatically. CCC (and its component elements) are all liquidity metrics we calculate and present as a matter of course. Figure 1, below, shows quarterl...

YOY Net InC., All  +34.8% YOY NET INc., Ex Mag 7 +16.8% YOY Op Inc., All +20.3% YOY Op Inc., Ex Mag 7 +13.1% Now that the Q1 earnings season is largely behind us, today Calcbench returns to a question that has lingered over Wall Street for the last six weeks. To what extent is overall corporate financial performance being propped up by the super-duper stellar performance of the tech giants?  In aggregate, that Q1 performance looks great : revenue up 11 percent from the year-earlier period, operating income up 20.3 percent, net income up 34.8 percent. No wonder Wall Street indices have been dancing decidedly upward for the last several months. Look deeper into the data, however, and one can see that much of that aggregate performance is thanks to the so-called Mag 7 stocks: Apple ($AAPL) Amazon ($AMZN) Alphabet ($GOOG)  Meta ($META) Microsoft ($MSFT) Nvidia ($NVDA) Tesla ($TSLA) We stripped out those seven firms from our Earnings Tracker sample, and then re-calc...

That’s all, folks — with earnings data from roughly 3,600 filers, including the last few giants such as Nvidia ($NVDA) and Walmart ($WMT), which both filed this week, we now call time on the Q1 2026 earnings season. Overall, it was good. Revenue was up 11 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 20.7 percent, and net income up 34.8 percent. Expense lines such as cost of goods sold, operating expense, and SG&A expense are all higher too, but none higher than the increase in revenue. Capex is up 29.5 percent although that number is skewed by the AI data center craze so we put an asterisk next to that one. Figure 1, below, shows year-over-year change across 18 assorted line items. Fun fact: Nvidia reported $58.32 billion in net income this week. If you omit that amount from all other net income this quarter (which was $585.1 billion), then the year-over-year gain would be only 21.4 percent, not the 34.8 percent we actually see in Figure 1, above. P...

Everyone might be gushing over Nvidia ’s ($NVDA) earnings report released earlier this week, but Calcbench is feeling a bit brick-and-mortar today.  So we’re going to look at Walmart ($WMT) instead, to revisit one of our favorite subjects these days: Walmart’s holdings in warehouse automation firm Symbotic ($SYM) and how those holdings affect Walmart’s earnings per share. We’ve written about this relationship before . Three months ago, Walmart reported EPS of $0.53 — but in a tiny footnote tucked away on Page 33 of the earnings release, Walmart said that Symbotic’s poor share performance that quarter had pulled down EPS by $0.21.  If you exclude that equity adjustment from net income, you’d have a non-GAAP adjusted EPS of $0.74. That’s what Walmart did, also on Page 33 of its earnings release that quarter.  OK, that was then; Walmart just filed its latest earnings release today for the quarter ending April 30. So what has changed?  For starters, Symbotic’s share p...