Q2 Earnings - Our First Look

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 faster than revenue. 

Figure 1, below, tells the story. The individual blue bars show the percentage change for various line items from the year-ago period; the orange line shows the number of firms counted for each item. 

We included the firm-count line this season to remind everyone that sometimes a few outlier companies can dramatically shape the change for an individual line item. That’s the case for restructuring costs in Figure 1. In theory they’re up a whopping 46.3 percent. In reality, a huge part of that swing is due solely to Intel ($INTC), which reported $1.89 billion in restructuring costs, nearly half of the $4.2 billion that 69 companies collectively reported. 

For those who prefer to consume their information in table format, we also have 10 major line items presented in Figure 2, below.

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 us@calcbench.com.