Calcbench

The third quarter of 2024 ends today, which means earnings reports for Q3 activity will start arriving in about two weeks (and then become a torrent by the end of October).  To help analysts prepare for that deluge of information, Calcbench reminds everyone that we have several earnings analysis templates ready to go, which will automatically capture and report earnings disclosures as your favorite companies and industry sectors file. For example, we have our pharmaceuticals industry template , which tracks the sales of blockbuster drugs. Each of several pharma industry giants (Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson) gets their own tab in the spreadsheet, and then each company tab tracks sales of individual drugs that reap $1 billion or more in revenue.  We also have our airlines industry template , which tracks performance metrics such as revenue per available seat mile (RASM), cost per available seat mile (CASM), ticket revenue, fuel cost per gallon, and more. You can see a s...

Headlines from China have been pounding out a steady message lately: the economy is not great, it’s not getting any better, and nobody is quite sure whether recent measures from Beijing meant to revive economic growth will do any good. So we wondered: which corporations have the most exposure to China, that they might feel a revenue squeeze if the country continues along its current economic malaise?  After spending a few minutes in our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page , we had an answer. Table 1, below, shows the 10 firms with the largest percentage of China-based revenues, based on their most recent annual reports.  In news that should surprise nobody, all 10 firms are engaged in the manufacture or design of microchips, industrial equipment, or other technology items with huge demand in China. Qualcomm ($QCOM) in particular has had a majority of its revenue come from China for years.  Further down the list were lots of other names you’d expect to see here, in...

Uniform and facilities maintenance giant Cintas ($CTAS) filed its latest quarterly report this week, and as we breezed through the company’s income statement, we realized it offered another opportunity to talk about one of our favorite subjects here at Calcbench: the value and importance of footnote-level data. First let’s look at the income statement itself , in Figure 1, below. We pulled up a few prior first fiscal quarter results for comparison. OK, the financial performance itself seems solid — but wow, Cintas classifies more than 20 percent of its revenue as “Other.” And that Other segment, whatever it is, went from $468.7 million two years ago to $567.7 million today; that’s an increase of 21 percent. That compares to growth of only 14 percent for Cintas’ uniform and facilities rental segment, which supposedly is the star of the show.  So exactly what’s in that Other segment? Why is it growing so fast, and what else can we learn about its performance?  Those answers are ...

Financial analysts love to pore over Nvidia’s financial disclosures these days — and really, who wouldn’t? The company has been growing like weeds, and offers a vital window into the possible future of artificial intelligence, one of the most important economic sectors around. Even we wrote about Nvidia ($NVDA) back in February, looking at the stunning growth of its AI segment. So we were delighted when an eagle-eyed researcher — no less than Shiva Rajgopal , head of the accounting department at Columbia Business School — brough an obscure detail to our attention. In its most recent fiscal year, Nvidia’s pretax U.S. earnings exceeded U.S. revenue . Figure 1, below, shows the proof.  Domestic pretax earnings were $29.49 billion. Domestic revenue was $26.96 billion. That’s less.  We had never seen something like this before — but in our defense, it’s such a weird concept that we’d never gone looking for it before either. Our first order of business was to use the world-famous C...

Signet Jewelers filed a rather tarnished quarterly earnings report last week , with sales down 7.6 percent from the year-earlier period and some unsettling discussion in the Management Discussion & Analysis disclosure about the market for diamonds and other jewelry these days. Let’s see what insights we can polish up from the data. First are the face financial statements, shown in Figure 1, below. Revenue and gross margin were both down more than 7 percent, but we were particularly intrigued with that $166 million asset impairment against Signet’s North America segment.  Hmmm. We next opened the Disclosures & Footnotes Query page to look at Signet’s geographic segments . North America sales went from $1.501 billion in the year-ago period to only $1.398 billion this quarter, a decline of 6.9 percent. (North America accounts for roughly 90 percent of Signet’s total sales.) We then used the Export History feature to track quarterly North America sales for the last four years....

One way that corporate financial reporting teams can put Calcbench to good use (one of many ways, of course) is to use our databases to research the disclosures that other companies are making about various issues; to give you a better sense of how you might structure your own disclosures. We’ve explored this idea before, looking at: Disclosure of risks related to artificial intelligence ;  Discussion of cash from operating activities ; Presentation of restricted cash . Today let’s look at another common headache for issues: disclosure of cybersecurity incidents. This is a fairly new requirement, driven by SEC rules adopted last year requiring issuers to disclose “material cybersecurity incidents” as 8-K filings within four days of deciding that the incident you just suffered is indeed material.  Specifically, companies file the 8-K as Item 1.05 — and you can indeed find those disclosures via Calcbench. You can either track individual companies and be alerted when they submit ...