Earnings Update: Tale of Two Tales

Today we have another update on corporate earnings from Q2 2025, and even at this early juncture — roughly 950 non-financial firms already reporting data, from an expected total of 3,400-ish by the end of earnings season in a few weeks — a clear story is starting to emerge.

The largest of the large firms are doing great. Everyone else, only so-so. 

Let’s start with total numbers overall. They are somewhat better than our first Q2 earnings update published last week thanks to a wave of rosy earnings releases this week, mostly from big tech companies. Revenue, operating income, and net income are all up by low- to mid-single digits — but operating and SG&A expenses are up too, both of them growing faster than revenue. Then again, cost of goods sold is growing more slowly than revenue, which is good; but only by a whisker, which is kinda sorta not good.

Figure 1, below, shows everything in table format.

The true story, however, is that only a handful of large, rapidly growing firms account for most of the growth in revenue and net income. If we strip those large firms out of the sample, revenue and net income are shrinking for everyone else.

For example, Q2 revenue for the 939 non-financial firms we’ve tracked so far stood at $3.08 trillion, up roughly $107.1 billion from the year-ago period. Except, more than half of that $107.1 billion —  $59.8 billion, or 56 percent — comes from five tech giants: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple. 

The trend only gets more pronounced from there. If you look at the 10 firms with the most revenue growth, they account for 75 percent of all revenue growth. If you look at the top 50, they account for 121 percent of all revenue growth. 

That means the other 890 firms in our sample collectively reported lower revenue in Q2 2025 from the year-ago period.

Net Income Growth: Same Dynamic

That same dynamic is also at work in net income, but even worse. The five firms reporting the biggest growth in net income account for more than all the growth by all the other firms:

The five firms with the most growth in net income aren’t exactly the same five firms with the most revenue growth, although Amazon and Google are in both categories. When you widen the lens to look at the 50 firms with the most growth in both categories — then yes, there is lots of overlap. 

So as we said at the start: the largest companies are doing great, which so far is skewing the curve for Corporate America overall. The vast majority of Corporate America isn’t enjoying robust growth in Q2, although the exact degree of un-enjoyment varies quite a bit from one firm to the next. 

Stay tuned for more updates in weeks to come, to see whether this bifurcated dynamic endures. 

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.