Calcbench

Retail giant Walmart ($WMT) filed its Q4 and full-year 2025 results today, leading off with a 4.7 percent increase in annual net sales and a 10.5 percent jump in consolidated net income.  Walmart being a large, sophisticated business, however, the company also reports a host of lower-profile disclosures too. Today we want to spotlight some of those items, how analysts can find them, and what information they might give you as you ponder Walmart’s results. For example, one useful metric for retailers is the ratio of inventory to net sales. If that number is rising, it means goods are piling up on the shelves while consumers stay away ; a state of affairs that often leads retailers to slash prices so they can clear the shelves for next season’s goods.  We used our Multi-Company page to pull up Walmart’s inventory and net sales numbers for fiscal years 2020-2026; and within a few moments had Figure 1, below. As you can see, that ratio bulged upward in 2022 and 2023. Inflation s...

China is still a very important trading partner of the United States and most large companies in the world, even amid the tariffs and other trade tensions that exist between the United States and China these days. So how are those trade tensions affecting the China revenues of major public filers? It’s still early in the reporting season, but we decided to crack open our Segments, Rollforward, and Breakouts page to see what analysts can already glean. We first selected the S&P 500 and then searched for all firms that reported a China geographic segment in 2025. Thirty-six companies have both (a) already reported their full-year 2025 numbers; and (b) reported revenue for a China operating segment.  We then compared those China revenues to the firms’ total revenues, and compiled a top 10 list of U.S. filers with the highest percentage of China revenue. See Figure 1, below. Perhaps to no surprise, the list is dominated by chip companies, some tech giants (Apple, Tesla), and MGM R...

Big tech stunned the world last week when Amazon ($AMZN) and Google ($GOOG) both filed 2025 earnings reports and also announced plans to spend astonishing amounts of money on data centers in 2026.  Their big bets came shortly after Meta ($META) and Microsoft ($MSFT) filed their own quarterly reports at the end of January, which also included plans for somewhat smaller but still staggering amounts of money going to data centers this year. The only one not yet disclosing fresh numbers is Oracle ($ORCL), but they’re scheduled to file their next earnings release on March 9, and we’ve already written about Oracle’s data center ambitions — and obligations — in the recent past.  So what does the biggest picture look like? Do the hyperscalers even have the cash to cover all these capex costs? We cracked open our Multi-Company page to take a look, tracking capex and operating cash flow by calendar quarter and then adding up those numbers by year, even though Microsoft and Oracle...

Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. Last week we saw hundreds more companies report Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings, and we now have year-over-year data on roughly 700 non-financial firms. Let’s see what tale they tell.  Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 12.1 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 21.2 percent, and revenue up 8.2 percent. Interestingly, cost of revenue is up 14.1 percent. That’s a lot, although it’s down from the 18.3 percent year-over-year gain in last week’s earnings analysis . Since high cost of revenue can indicate higher prices for customers (read: price inflation) down the road, we’ll need to watch that line item closely as more firms file earnings and we get a sense of the bigger picture. Within two weeks we should have a much better view into what’s going on. On the other hand, operating expenses are up only 5.9 percent, and SG&A expenses up 7.1 percent. Both o...

Disney Corp. ($DIS) released its latest quarterly earnings on Monda y, and we get to those numbers momentarily; but the real news came on Tuesday, when Disney announced a successor to legendary and long-time CEO Robert Iger : Josh D’Amaro, who has been running Disney’s theme parks and cruise lines division since 2020. If you’ve been a close follower of Disney’s financial data, however, D’Amaro’s promotion to the top office isn’t really a surprise. Disney reports three principal operating segments:  Entertainment, which includes Disney films, television, and streaming services such as Hulu and Disney+; Sports, which is ESPN and various other sports channels overseas; and Experiences, which are the Disney resorts and cruise lines. One might assume that Disney is primarily an entertainment business because these are the folks who, ya know, invented Mickey Mouse and made zillions of dollars from the Avengers movies. But Disney reports revenue and operating profit for each of the three ...