A Final Update on Q4 Earnings

That’s it, folks — the Calcbench Earnings Tracker is calling time today on Q4 earnings, and the past week’s filers delivered a final pop to overall earnings compared to the year-ago period. 

Our latest analysis captures data from more than 2,100 non-financial firms that had filed Q4 earnings releases by 3 p.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 28. Net income grew nearly 18 percent from the year-ago period, with revenue, capex spending, and Sales, General & Administrative costs all also a few points higher than they were for Q4 2023.


Figure 1, below, gives our final numbers for the quarter.



Some people might ask, “What about Nvidia? Didn’t they just report gobs and gobs of net income, and is that skewing net income growth for the whole?” That’s a fair question; NVidia ($NVDA) did report $9.8 billion in net income earlier this week, which is indeed an enormous sum. 


Still, the answer is no, Nvidia’s performance did not skew results to any unusual degree. Even if you exclude the AI chipmaker from our analysis, net income still stood at 15.9 percent higher than Q4 2023. 


That said, the Nvidia question does point to another, related issue: that impressive net income number is heavily tilted toward the largest firms in our sample group.


Specifically, the 50 firms with the biggest net income numbers account for 55 percent of all net income ($446.18 billion’s worth) in our sample of 2,140 non-financial firms. The remaining 45 percent is split among more than 2,000 smaller firms. 


To a certain extent, that’s to be expected; bigger firms generate more revenue and more net income. But the pattern is indeed quite lop-sided, and in a spot-check we noticed that many of those smaller firms actually reported net losses in Q4. It makes you wonder about the health of Corporate America overall. We’ll dig into the data and explore that issue more deeply in further posts next week. 


Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.


If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 


Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at info@calcbench.com.


Meanwhile, that’s all for Q4. The Earnings Tracker will now take a breather for six weeks, until mid-April rolls around and we can start looking at Q1 2025!

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