Calcbench

Five of the six major U.S. airlines have now filed their Q2 earnings reports, so it’s time for another quick stop in the land of earnings analysis. As we’ve said before, we love airline earnings data because the airlines report several fascinating non-GAAP financial performance metrics, such as total revenue per available seat mile (TRASM), load factor (the percentage of seats sold), and average fuel price per gallon. Calcbench tracks all that stuff! Subscribers can even use our airline industry template to track the latest earnings data as the airlines file it! For example, Figure 1, below, tracks TRASM for the six major U.S. carriers for the last five years.  As you can see, the airlines suffered a disastrous decline in TRASM during the 2020 pandemic year, then made a remarkable climb back to normalcy in the first half of 2022. All six have flown onward at roughly the same levels since then, each one fluctuating in a relatively narrow band.  Now compare TRASM to the more tra...

Welcome to second-quarter earnings season, everyone! We now have several hundred corporate earnings releases neatly indexed in the Calcbench databases, so it’s time to bring back our famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker! Each week from now until the end of August, Calcbench will crunch the earnings numbers of non-financial companies and compare that performance to the numbers from one year ago. As of this morning, July 25, we already have data for roughly 350 non-financial firms. As one might expect at this early juncture, the picture is mixed. Revenue is up a few percentage points, and operating income and net income are both up by a few points more; that’s good.  On the other hand, capex, opex, and SG&A expense (sales, general, and administrative) are all up a few points more than revenue too. That could suggest inflationary pressures are starting to hit corporations, but cost of goods sold — which would typically be the clearest indicator of inflation pressures — didn’t rise f...

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman ($NOC) filed its second-quarter earnings release on Tuesday, which gives us yet another chance to indulge in our favorite hobby — segment-level financial analysis! In this instance, we wanted to look at order backlog. We’ve written previously about order backlog at defense contractors , comparing numbers among Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and RTX Corp. Today we wanted to focus specifically on funded versus unfunded backlog.  As defined by Northrop, funded backlog represents firm orders for which an entity has authorized and appropriated funding; unfunded backlog are those orders that have been placed, but funding hasn’t yet been appropriated.  Backlog is a valuable detail to know, since it helps analysts understand a defense contractor’s long-term revenue pipeline and the possible risks to it. Hence Northrop discloses its backlog by operating segment — but you do have to look for it; the information is tucked away on Page 14 of the...

Second quarter earnings releases are now picking up steam, and as the volume of filings continues to accelerate in coming weeks, analysts are bound to start seeing more disclosures about the economic effects of tariffs.  To be clear, companies don’t need to file any formal disclosure about tariffs under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles; and in the two dozen or so Q2 2025 earnings releases we’ve already seen , a majority of filers aren’t saying anything specific about tariffs.  At the same time, however, nothing in federal securities law forbids a company from making a disclosure about tariffs either, and some filers have done so. Let’s take a look at some of the interesting ones we’ve seen so far.  One example is aluminum maker Alcoa ($AA), which filed its Q2 earnings release on July 16 . The company reported paying $115 million in tariff costs for importing aluminum from Canada into the United States: In the second quarter 2025, Alcoa incurred approximate...

Second-quarter earnings reports started to arrive this week, including three Wall Street kingpins in rapid succession on Tuesday morning: JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), Wells Fargo ($WFC), and Citigroup ($C).  We already posted a quick analysis on LinkedIn today , and overall the results were pretty good. For example, revenue was up for all three of JPMorgan’s primary lines of business compared to the year-ago period. Loan-loss provisions were down at both Wells Fargo and JPMorgan, too. Wall Street banks report a ton of data so there’s lots more to study, but so far the banks say U.S. consumers are still chugging along .  Calcbench will take deeper dives into the bank data in due course. For now, however, we wanted to start with a quick glance at return on equity. “ROE” is calculated by dividing net income into shareholder equity, and measures how efficiently a company generates profits. It’s a key performance metric for banks.  We just used our See Tag History feature to trac...

So Congress signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law. Other people can debate the merits of the massive tax and spending plan as a whole — but there’s one implication for corporate earnings that Calcbench can address right away. The implication is this: the law includes a provision that will allow companies to deduct more of interest expenses they incur from taxable corporate income, which in turn will goose earnings per share upward. And while the deduction is structured in a way that’s likely to be particularly helpful to small companies, Calcbench has developed a template so that financial analysts can quickly estimate the benefit for any public filer.  Under pre-existing tax rules, companies were allowed to deduct interest expense for interest that was as much as 30 percent — but not more — of earnings before interest and tax, otherwise known as EBIT. The One Big Beautiful Bill, however, says that deduction can now equal 30 percent of EBIT plus depreciation and amortizatio...

As you may have seen in the news, the Trump Administration is warning Japan that 25 percent tariffs will start against the country on Aug. 1 , presumably as a negotiating tactic to pressure Japan into cutting some sort of trade deal with the United States before then.  Will this deadline stick? We don’t know. Will that 25 percent tariff rate endure? See previous statement.  But Calcbench can help financial analysts get at least some sense of U.S. corporations’ exposure to retaliatory tariffs, by tallying up revenues that U.S. firms report from the Japanese market. We simply visited our Segments, Rollforwards, and Breakouts page, pulled up the geographic segments reported by the S&P 500, and filtered the results by the word “Japan.”  Table 1, below, shows the 10 firms with the greatest percentage of 2024 revenue coming from the Japanese market.  On the other hand, we could also rank firms by their Japan revenue in absolute dollar terms. That gives us Table 2,...