Calcbench

Today we continue our occasional series on how you can use Calcbench to better understand companies’ exposure to “trade war risk,” this time turning to the balance sheet.  The question: which U.S. registrants have sunk lots of money into China operations, and are those companies now trying to reduce those investments as trade war frictions increase?  One way analysts can explore the answer to that question is to look at a company’s disclosures for property, plant, and equipment (PP&E) specifically in China — a number that dozens of companies do disclose every year, typically tucked away somewhere in the PP&E footnote. Our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts database lets you pull that disclosure out, so you can see how large it is and how it changes over time.  For example, we used the Segments database to search for all U.S. registrants who reported PP&E in China in their 2024 annual reports. We found 131 firms, which altogether disclosed $71.7 billion in...

Carnival Corp . filed its latest quarterly earnings release on Friday , a filing that’s always worth a peek since the disclosures can be so telling. For example, in the early 2020s Carnival ($CCL) offered a glimpse into how hospitality businesses first suffered and then recovered from the pandemic. These days Carnival is something of a barometer for consumer spending: if you don’t have lots of money to spend or confidence in your future earnings, you’re probably not dropping lots of cash to go on a cruise.  Plus, Carnival’s earnings release has numerous disclosures that let you do some fun analysis. So let’s dig in! Interesting item No. 1 is that Carnival reports two lines of revenue: ticketing sales for future trips, and onboard sales of people buying things while on the boat. We were curious how those two lines of revenue have evolved over time, so we used our Export Data Tables feature to track quarterly revenue for both lines of business for the last four years. See Figure 1, ...

Last month we had a post in these pages about how Amazon ($AMZN) recently shortened the estimated useful lifespan of the computer servers it uses , which will have the practical effect of reducing operating income this year by some $700 million.  Now Bloomberg has pulled on that thread more strongly, with an in-depth look at how companies adjust the useful lifespan of assets they use . It turns out that numerous companies do this — sometimes extending the estimated lifespan, which can push net income up; and sometimes shortening the estimated lifespan, which pushes net income down. The key issue here is that as you shorten estimated lifespan, your annual depreciation charges increase; that’s what whittles down net income. The same principle runs in reverse, too: extending estimated lifespan spreads out depreciation across more years, so your annual depreciation is lower; that pushes net income up. Cynics will suspect that adjustments to estimated lifespan are simply a form of earn...

One of the common beliefs among market observers these days is that the largest firms are hogging a disproportionate share of net income, while everyone else fights for the remaining scraps of a shrinking pie. Well, Calcbench ran some numbers — and, um, yeah; that’s pretty accurate. No wonder another Hunger Games book is hitting the shelves . Specifically, Calcbench examined the revenue and net income disclosures of 1,570 non-financial firms for the last four years. We found that by 2024, the 50 largest firms by revenue accounted for half of all net income for the entire study population. Meanwhile, the remaining 1,520 firms were reporting more net losses year after year and saw average net income per firm decline year after year; while the 50 big boys reported fewer net losses and their average net income went up.  Let’s unpack all that in a few charts.  Figure 1, below, shows net income for the 50 largest firms (ranked by 2024 revenue) and net income for the entire popula...

In our previous posts about ways to assess U.S. companies’ exposure to trade wars, we mostly focused on “outbound” risks of another country imposing tariffs on U.S. companies’ exports into that country. Case in point was our post earlier this week examining which U.S. companies get a significant portion of revenue from exports to China . Today we want to take a different tack: which U.S. companies import lots of goods from China, which therefore might be subject to the Trump Administration’s new tariffs?  This is not easy to do, because companies aren’t required to disclose an “imports from China” line-item — but analysts can glean some telling clues, if you know where to look in the disclosures companies do make. Our example in this exercise is Dollar General Corp. ($DG). The discount retail giant brings in nearly $40 billion in annual revenue by selling ultra-cheap goods, so lots of those items must come from China, right?  We began by opening our Disclosures & Footnote...

We return to the front lines of the tariff wars today, this time shifting our focus east: which U.S. companies report the greatest reliance on revenue from China? After all, U.S. tariffs against Canada and Mexico are still a wild guessing game — but tariffs against China are here, and seem to be going nowhere but up. China has now responded in kind, imposing tariffs of its own on various U.S. imports and even blacklisting some companies entirely.  Just last week, for example, we had a post on the predicament of Illumina ($ILMN), a genomics company that received 7 percent of 2024 revenue from China. Beijing announced a ban on Illumina imports last week in response to U.S. tariffs; today the company lowered its 2025 earnings guidance and announced $100 million in planned cost-cuts to offset that squeeze. So what other U.S. companies might face similar pressures, as Beijing ratchets up its retaliatory measures?  To answer that question Calcbench cracked open our ever-handy Seg...