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Earnings Update Week 4: The Picture Firms Up

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We are now nearing the end of Q2 earnings season, with data from more than 3,000 non-financial companies in our sample group. At this point the overall picture isn’t likely to change much, and it really hasn’t changed much since last week either: this has been a good quarter for Corporate America. As you can see in Figure 1, below, revenue, operating income, EBIT, and net income are all up from the year-ago period by double digits. Cost of revenue and operating expenses are up by double digits too, but neither one is exceeding revenue growth, so companies are keeping their financial noses above water. Can’t complain about any of that.  We did want to call out that impressive-looking net income number, up 65.9 percent from Q2 2025. A jump like that might seem super-cool at first glance, but remember: a significant part of it comes from one-time gains that a handful of companies are reporting, rather than booming growth in core operations. We first noted that issue several weeks ago...
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Tracking Off-Balance Sheet Lease Commitments for Data Centers

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Everyone knows that the tech giants and AI hyperscalers are betting big on data centers. Calcbench has been taking a deep dive into Q2 disclosures of those companies, and today we offer a better sense of how big those bets are. Bets, by the way, that aren’t included on the tech giants’ balance sheets . These bets travel under the rather boring names “uncommenced leases” or “unrecognized lease commitments.” As the name implies, these are leases (typically for AI data centers) that the company has signed and do exist, but the leases haven’t yet started and don’t appear on the company’s balance sheet.  Altogether, among the six companies leading the charge on data center development, these uncommenced lease expenses now exceed $1 trillion. Figure 1, below, shows how the expenses have soared in recent years — from $321.5 billion in 2024, to $700.2 billion in 2025, to $1.13 trillion as of Q2 2026.  As you can see, different companies are racking up these u...
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Earnings Update Week 3: Enter Everyone Else

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This was a busy week for corporate earnings, as more than 1,000 companies across a wide range of industries filed their Q2 earnings reports. We now have 2,050 non-financial companies in our famed Earnings Tracker, so let’s see where things stand. As you can see in Figure 1, below, the numbers still look respectable — even a bit better than last week’s earnings update .  Revenue is up 16.1 percent from the year-ago period, while cost of revenue is up 14.4 percent. The spread between those numbers (170 basis points) is a bit better than last week, when the spread was only 100 points.  Operating income is up 31.5 percent (better than last week), and net income is up 63.7 percent (still largely thanks to a one-time accounting adjustment from Google Alphabet’s stake in SpaceX, which we discussed a few weeks ago ). Cash, EBIT, total assets, cash flow from operations; they’re all moving in the right direction. Questions we still want to explore as soon as our crack research team get...
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Booming GPL-1 Sales at Lilly

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Mounjaro Sales Q2-26 $9.94B Zepbound SALES Q2-26 $4.93B All other SALES Q2-26 $6.98B Eli Lilly & Co. filed its Q2 earnings this morning . That gives us an excellent excuse to crack open the Calcbench databases and dine on Lilly’s disclosures about its blockbuster weight-loss drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro. As we’ve noted before in these pages, pharmaceutical firms disclose the sales of their individual blockbuster drugs. So we opened our Segments, Rollforwards & Breakouts page , called up Lilly’s ($LLY) quarterly revenues for Zepbound and Mounjaro, and then compared the sales of those two drugs against all Lilly’s other products.  The result is Figure 1, below. As you can see, Lilly’s two GLP-1 weight loss drugs went from 26.5 percent of total sales at the start of 2024 ($2.32 billion against $8.77 billion) to two-thirds of total sales today ($14.9 billion of $23 billion).  Figure 2, below, takes all that information and reframes it in dollar amounts. Again, the tale is...
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Earnings Update, Week 2

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YoY Revenue Increase 14.8% YoY Op Inc. Increase 26.9% Net inc. Increase 66.8% We now have roughly 800 firms in our Q2 Earnings Tracker! A vast range of non-financial companies announced second-quarter earnings this week, so we have a much better sense of where corporate performance is and how it compares to one year ago. Overall, the numbers still look respectable.  As you can see in Figure 1, below, revenue is up 14.8 percent from the year-ago period, a marginal improvement from the 13.6 percent from last week’s earnings update (with, admittedly, far fewer companies in our sample). Operating income is up 10.3 percent, and net income up 66.8 percent. About that net income number, however. As we unpacked in last week’s earnings post, a huge portion of that year-over-year increase (currently at 66.8 percent) is solely due to Google Alphabet ($GOOG) and its one-time $98 billion gain from recognizing the SpaceX ($SPCX) shares that Google has owned since 2015. Strip that $98 billion o...
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Airline Fuel Costs Take Off Like a Rocket

Everyone probably knew well ahead of major U.S. airlines filing their Q2 earnings that fuel costs would be bad — but wow, did anyone expect it would be this bad?  All six U.S. majors have now filed their Q2 earnings reports. ( Jetblue was the last, filing earlier this week .) As we’ve noted many times before, all six disclose their total fuel costs and average price per gallon of fuel every quarter. Calcbench tracks all this, which allows us to chart the airlines’ price of fuel over time.  Figure 1, below, shows the average price per gallon for all six airlines. Brace for impact. What verb can one even use to describe the increase in costs for Q2, the first quarter that fully captures the higher costs driven by the U.S. war against Iran? Soar? Spike? Pop? Rocket?  We previously wrote about jet fuel costs in early July , when Delta Air Lines ($DAL) was the first airline to report Q2 earnings. At the time, we did some trigonometry to ca...
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