Earnings Update: Firms Still Holding On

Another week, another batch of somewhat favorable earnings data from Corporate America. The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker now has Q2 data from more than 2,300 non-financial firms — and in the aggregate, you can’t find too much that warrants gloom, panic, or hyperventilating.

Figure 1, below, shows the big picture. 

Revenue, operating income, and net income are all up from the year-ago period, which is good. At the same time, important line items to understand operation costs — cost of revenue, SG&A Expense, and operating expense — are all up too, although not quite as much as revenue and income numbers. 

So despite all the pressures of tariffs, inflation, a sluggish job market, and other economic uncertainty, Corporate America is keeping its nose above water. That’s enough to declare victory at the end of a workweek.

That said, remember our earnings update from last Friday, where we noted that a relatively small number of large firms accounted for essentially all the revenue and net income growth for our sample size until that point; remove those few dozen super-successful firms, and the rest of Corporate America actually saw revenue and net income decline compared to the year-ago period.

Then again, we’re in the thick of earnings season now, and our sample size has roughly doubled in the last week alone. We haven’t done a more in-depth analysis yet to see whether that superstar effect is still present this week. Stay tuned for more analysis next week. 

Or, for those who’d like to see the data presented in another way, consider 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.