Calcbench

Today we have yet another entry in the annals of unusual tariff disclosures — this time from beleaguered children’s clothing retailer Children’s Place ($PLCE), which apparently has decided to sell its expected tariff refunds as a short-term cash infusion. First let’s look at the big picture, which is not particularly good for Children’s Place right now. As described in its latest quarterly report, filed on June 12 , year-over-year sales declined 11.1 percent, its operating loss grew by 74.9 percent, and quarterly net loss went from $34 million to $53.2 million, a jump of 56.3 percent. Management lamented that “our value customer has been impacted by higher gas and grocery prices,” and talked about “transformation efforts in a challenging retail environment.”  Then came the interesting stuff.  Children’s also reported that it has filed for $40 million in tariff refunds. That’s about 3.1 percent of Children’s total 2025 sales, which were $1.21 billion. (The U.S. Supreme Court o...

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...