Posts

Two Tales of Disclosing Automation Costs

Image
Grocery giant Kroger ($KR) filed its full-year 2025 earnings release this morning, with a rather unpleasant $2.5 billion impairment charge for a warehouse automation project that never delivered on its expected promises. The impairment charge wasn’t a surprise. Kroger had previously disclosed the matter in a filing on Nov. 18 , framing the matter as an “updated e-commerce plan” where Kroger would close three fulfillment warehouses around the United States. The impairment translates to a one-time hit to EPS of $2.91 per diluted share. Wait a minute, warehouse automation costs… Why does that ring a bell?  Because Walmart ($WMT) reported its own EPS issues with warehouse automation several weeks ago — but did so in a very different way. Together, the two earnings releases present a fascinating comparison of how large businesses might treat projects and how they disclose issues to investors when said project goes wobbly. First, Kroger. The company originally struck a partnership in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Signal: Provision for Loan Losses and Revenue

Provision for Loan Losses as Percentage of Revenue, 2023-2025 Provisions for loan losses (PLL) is a valuable insight into the strength of financial firms' growth prospects. Calcbench allows users to plot PLL as a percentage of revenue over time to see which firms have significant shifts in PLL, which can be a leading indicator of potential lending trouble. The below chart shows PLL as percentage of revenue for 28 financial firms for the last three years. Some firms have two or one dots when the year-over-year percentages are unchanged. Calcbench subscribers can find this data in several ways. You could use our Multi-Company page to track revenue and PLL for any group of companies you like (although PLL is mostly a disclosure for financial firms) and then ask for a time-series of data for both metrics. You could also configure a template with our Excel Add-In. For Premium subscribers, the data would automatically populate i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Earnings Roundup: Feb. 27

Image
Net Income +10.2% YoY change, Q4 2025 vs. Q4 2024 Revenue +8.5% YoY change, Q4 2025 vs. Q4 2024 Cash +9.8% YoY change, Q4 2025 vs. Q4 2024 We are just about at the end of Q4 and full-year earnings season, and this Friday have perhaps our last earnings roundup of the season courtesy of the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker.  We now have more than 2,000 non-financial firms in our sample, including important late filers such as Walmart ($WMT) and Nvidia ($NVDA), which just filed two days ago. Figure 1, below, shows the change in Q4 2025 numbers from the year-ago period. Most notably, net income is up 10.2 percent from one year ago, revenue up 8.5 percent. EBIT, operating income, and cash from operations are all up by double-digits too. Cash is up 9...
Post a Comment
Read more

Price Cuts at Novo Nordisk

Image
You may have seen headlines lately that pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk ($NVO) will enact significant price cuts for its blockbuster weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus starting in 2027. Novo Nordisk is cutting prices because it’s facing stiff competition from Eli Lilly &Co. ($LLY) and pressure from government regulators to make the popular drugs more affordable. The cuts will lower the price for a one-month supply to $675, which translates into reductions of from 35 to 50 percent depending on the exact drug.  For financial analysts, an important question emerges: Just how much money does Novo Nordisk make from these drugs, anyway? As always, Calcbench can help. Novo Nordisk is based in Denmark, and as a foreign issuer its annual report is known as a Form 20-F. In that report, however, the company does report the sales of individual drugs just like U.S. pharmaceutical companies do. (We have a pharmaceutical sales template available for Calcbench premium subscr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Equity Compenstation: The Hidden Cash Drain Forcing Meta to Borrow for AI

Image
Reading the Signals: Why Meta Borrows While Swimming in Cash Meta 3%  How much Free Cash Flow is left after deducting  Share Repurchasing Spend and Equity Withholding Taxes Alphabet 19% How Much Free Cash Flow is left after deducting Share Repurchasing and Equity With Holding Taxes
Post a Comment
Read more

CapEx: Ex Big 6 — Or Is It Big 4?

CapEx: Ex Big 6 — Or Is It Big 4? | Calcbench Earnings Monitor CALCBENCH Earnings Monitor · Feb 20, 2026 Calcbench Earnings Monitor CapEx: Ex Big 6 — Or Is It Big 4? 📅 Feb 20, 2026 📊 Q4 2025 vs Q4 2024 +14.9% Broad market CapEx growth 4 Companies driving the gain −3.4% CapEx growth ex-hyperscalers Four Companies Are Driving the Entire CapEx Story Here is the headline: across more than 1,100 public companies, Capital Expenditures appear to be up nearly 15% year-over-year. But that number is almost entirely a mirage. Strip out four companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — and CapEx for the rest of corporate America actually fell 3.4% in Q4 2025 versus a year ago. Four firms. That is the entire story. Everything else is noise. We will show you the data below — but we wanted to say that up front,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Days Sales Outstanding

Accounts Receivable Analysis  ·  SIC Division 7 Three Firms With Unbroken DSO Growth, 2020–2025 Of 68 publicly-traded SIC Code Division 7 companies analyzed in Business Services, only three recorded a higher Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) in every successive year from 2020 through 2024. 2025 data shown where available. This analysis was inspired by a post on Michael Burry's blog, Cassandra Unchained , which originally highlighted Palantir's rising DSO trend. We extended the analysis across all 68 SIC Division 7 companies in our dataset to identify whether the pattern was unique to Palantir. Palantir Technologies 65.3 2025 DSO (days) ▲ +30.7 days since 2020 Match Group 33.9 2025 DSO (days) ▲ +14.6 days since 2020 Dayforce, Inc.* 51.1 2025 DSO (days, est.) ▲ +11.8 days since 2020 ...
Post a Comment
Read more