Q4 Earnings Keep Powering Along

Another week, another update on Q4 earnings from the Calcbench Earnings Tracker. Our latest analysis, of more than 700 companies, shows brisk growth in net income from the year-earlier period and a few other important metrics also moving in the right direction. 

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.


At close of business on Friday, Feb. 7, we had Q4 filings for more than 700 non-financial firms. Revenue was up 3.11 percent, but net income popped an impressive 17.6 percent compared to the end of 2023. See Figure 1, below.



One nice data point is the cost of revenue, which is down 3.2 percent from the year-ago period. That tracks with our first Q4 earnings update last week, which reported a 3.94 percent decline — but that first week tracked only about 120 large firms, and wasn’t necessarily reflective of trends for all filers. Now we have 700+ firms from a wide range of industries, and are getting closer to trends reflective of all filers. Cost of revenue is still going down. For anyone still scarred by the inflation spike of two years ago, you can continue to breathe easier. 


Also note that Sales, General & Administrative expenses are down 1.8 percent. That could be reflective of lower payroll costs, or lower costs for items such as shipping, office supplies, utilities, or other overhead. Whatever the specifics, SG&A costs are down. CFOs won’t complain about that. 


Calcbench will continue to update our earnings tracker at the end of every week for the next few weeks, as quarterly reports flood into the database. 


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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quick Takes on Free Cash Flow

Image
One of the most important metrics of corporate health these days is free cash flow: the amount of cash a company still has after it pays its for routine operating expenses (opex) and capital expenditures (capex). That remaining cash (abbreviated as FCF) can pay for lofty ambitions such as R&D, acquisitions, dividends, or share buybacks. It also pays down a company’s debt load — and hence FCF is so important these days. As interest rates remain stubbornly high and many companies refinance their debts from the late 2010s at those higher rates, companies will need strong FCF to cover those larger interest payments.  So the crack Calcbench research team wondered: How has free cash flow been performing lately?  To answer that question, we visited our Multi-Company database page and pulled up free cash flow disclosures for more than 1,700 non-financial companies with annual revenue of $100 million or more. Figure 1, below, shows total free cash flow for that group for the last ...
Read more

On Amazon and Server Lifespans

So there we were the other day, skimming the latest from Deep Quarry , a newsletter on financial statement analysis written by accounting aficionado Olga Usvyatsky.  She had been picking apart Amazon.com’s latest quarterly report , and noted that the e-commerce giant had revised the useful life of certain servers and networking equipment downward from six to five years. That change, Usvyatsky noted, will have the practical effect of reducing 2025 operating income by $700 million. Moreover, Amazon ($AMZN) also decided to retire some equipment early; that led to $920 million in accelerated depreciation in Q4 2024 and will reduce 2025 operating income by another $600 million. Wait a minute. The useful life of computer servers, why does that sound familiar…  Because Calcbench wrote about that exact issue in 2021!  Back then, we noted that Google ($GOOG) and Microsoft ($MSFT) had both extended the estimated life of their computer servers from three years to four, which had t...
Read more

Counting Up the Tech Giants and Net Income

Image
All the technology giants will be filing their 2024 annual reports by late January, and they’re all likely to report gobs and gobs of net income; but how many gobs of net income, exactly, compared to the rest of Corporate America?  After all, one popular theory in financial analysis in recent years is that earnings from the tech giants have been pulling away from the rest of large corporations, devouring an ever-larger share of total net income. So using our Multi-Company database page , the crack Calcbench research pulled net income numbers for the S&P 500 for the last seven years, and then mapped out what share of total net income went to eight tech giants compared to all other firms.  The eight firms we classified as tech giants are: Amazon ($AMZN) Apple ($AAPL) Broadcom ($AVGO) Facebook ($META) Google ($GOOG) Microsoft ($MSFT) Netflix ($NFLX) Nvidia ($NVDA) The results are in Figure 1, below. As you can see, the share of net income from the tech giants (in red) has es...
Read more