Calcbench

Airlines spend lots of money on fuel; everyone knows that already. Airlines have been spending even more money on fuel this year thanks to the war in Iran, which has pushed fuel costs to, well, sky-high prices. But when you examine fuel costs as a percentage of revenue, something strange emerges: that dire picture gets better. For five of the six major U.S. airlines, fuel costs as a percentage of revenue declined in Q3. Those percentages are still painfully high, but they’re decidedly lower than the nosebleed levels reported in Q2. See Figure 1, below. The only exception to this pattern was Delta Air Lines ($DAL), whose relative fuel costs (that’s what we’re calling fuel as a percentage of revenue) went from 21 percent in Q2 to 22 percent in Q3. Then again, Delta’s relative fuel costs are also far lower than those of the other five airlines. That’s because Delta owns its own fuel refinery, which lets the airline shave its fuel costs by a few cents per gallon ev...

Calcbench is back with our latest Q3 earnings roundup. Earnings growth overall continues to look good, but beware! The AI hyperscalers entered the chat this week, and their numbers do distort a few key line items. First let’s look at the big picture. We now have Q3 earnings data from more than 750 non-financial companies. Figure 1, below, shows that revenue is up 14.5 percent from the year-ago period, operating income is up 33.5 percent, and net income is up 30.5 percent. Revenue and net income growth this week are both somewhat decelerated from the growth we saw in Week 1 , but that’s to be expected as a larger number of smaller companies join our sample. What caught our eye this week was growth in capital expenditures. So far this quarter, overall growth in capex spending is up 58.6 percent.  That number sounds impressive at first, but it includes capex spending from the four AI hyperscalers — Alphabet ($GOOG), Amazon ($AMZN), Meta ($META), and Microso...

Backlog Q3 2026 $745B Revenue Q3 2026 $94.91B Backlog/Rev. Multiple 7.85 Among the many companies filing Q3 earnings this week is aircraft maker Boeing ($BA), still trying to shake off years of financial and operational disruption from the disastrous crashes of two Boeing 737-Max jets in the late 2010s and subsequent regulatory and legal settlements in the early 2020s. Nobody would claim Boeing has returned to form yet, and the company did just post a $116 million net loss for the quarter — but when you examine Boeing’s disclosures about order backlog, perhaps one could say the company’s worst turbulence is behind it. What makes those backlog disclosures so interesting is that Boeing reports them in two ways: as a dollar amount, which now stands at $745 billion; and as number of planes on order, which stands at 6,300. This lets us do some clever analysis to see whether Boeing’s growth in backlog is enough to support growth in revenue.  We can start with the monetary backlog. That...