Calcbench

Today we want to keep pulling on a financial analysis thread we first noticed in our post last week about Q3 2024 earnings : that trends in spending on capital equipment may not be as rosy as they seem. Specifically, we noticed that while growth in “capex” spending among 3,200 firms seems positive — up 17 percent compared to the year-ago period — that increase was actually driven by only 10 firms spending gobs more money on capital expenditures . Among all the other firms we examined, Q3 2024 capex spending actually fell compared to Q3 2023 levels. So how true is that pattern, really? Which firms are pouring money into capex spending, and to what extent is that spending among the few distorting the picture for the whole?  To unpack those issues, we first pulled together a peer group of 1,800 non-financial firms with at least $100 million in revenue. Then, using our Bulk Data Query page , we looked at their quarterly capex spending from the start of 2021 through Q2 2024, broken into...

Earlier this week Comcast Corp. ($CMCSA) sent shockwaves through the media and entertainment worlds by announcing that it will spin off its cable operations — including CNBC, MSNBC, SyFy, the Golf Channel, and other network brands — into a stand-alone entertainment company sometime next year. Who could’ve guessed that was coming? Calcbench users, that’s who! Back in August we had two consecutive posts about large entertainment companies taking big impairments on their cable TV operations: Warner Bros. Discovery ($WBD) announced a $9.1 billion impairment charge on Aug. 7, and then Paramount Global ($PARA) followed up with a $6 billion impairment charge one day later.  In both instances, the companies disclosed a long-term growth rate of negative 3 percent and discount rates of an eye-popping 10.5 percent (Warner Bros.) and 11 percent (Paramount).  With horrible long-term prospects from those two, should anyone really be surprised that Comcast is getting out of cable TV no...

It’s Friday during earnings season, which means the Calcbench Earnings Tracker is back again with our latest look at Q3 earnings and how they compare to the year-ago period. As devout readers of this blog know, we use the Earnings Tracker to collect financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We first turned on the tracker for Q3 2024 earnings several weeks ago; as of today we now have data on nearly 3,200 non-financial firms crunched and ready for your analysis. The headline performance numbers are in Figure 1, below. As you can see, revenue is up 3.7 percent from the year-ago period, while net income is down 8.3 percent. We previously noted that the decline in net income was driven by two specific one-time items at Intel ($INTC) and Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) that were so huge they skewed net income for the entire sample; strike those two, and net income for everyone else was actually up.  That still holds...

As end of the year approaches, today we wanted to circle back to goodwill and intangible assets. Why? Because the fourth quarter is typically when companies test their goodwill assets for impairments.  This is important because more companies now have more of their total assets tied up in goodwill or other intangible assets — so if you do need to declare an impairment, it can be a gut punch to the income statement. Investors do not like this, and financial analysts are always on the lookout for warning signs of impairments.  The good news is that we have no visible shifts in market dynamics this year that suggest a wave of goodwill impairments are looming. (Compare that to, say, 2020, when the covid pandemic forced companies to declare goodwill impairments all over the place.) Still, we wanted to get a sense of companies’ overall exposure to goodwill assets, just as a thought experiment to help us understand who might be most vulnerable to impairment risk. For example, Figure ...

Today we continue our review of the retail sector disclosures (ahead of that sector’s Q3 earnings releases, which will arrive in the next few weeks) by examining the wide range of disclosures that retailers typically make in their earnings releases.  One good example comes from Dollar Genera l ($DG), the discount retail giant that made $38.7 billion in its fiscal 2023. Dollar General filed its second-quarter earnings release at the end of August, and included numerous nifty items: Same-store sales Merchandise inventories Category sales Store count Square footage You can track all these disclosures in the Footnote Query & Disclosure tool in Calcbench, seeing how they have evolved over time. For example, we used the Export History feature to dig up the total square footage of Dollar General stores for the last 14 quarters and put them into a chart. Figure 1, below, took us less than three minutes.  But wait, there’s more! We then dug up Dollar General’s quarterly revenue, ...

Q3 earnings growth for the week ending Nov. 8 is pretty much the same story we told last week : a seeming decline in net income, which actually is driven by two statistical outliers. Exclude those two and earnings growth is actually up 3.5 percent from the year-ago period. So says the Calcbench Earnings Tracker, which we use during earnings season to collect financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We first turned on the tracker for Q3 2024 earnings last week; as of this week we now have data on more than 2,300 firms crunched and ready for your analysis. Figure 1, below, shows the headline data. That 7.3 percent decline in net income might seem alarming, but the drop is thanks to two huge, one-time items from Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) and Intel ($INTC): J&J reported a massive gain one year ago when it sold off its stake in Kenvue Corp. ($KVUE) for $21.7 billion. That gain didn’t recur in Q3 2024, so ev...