Q3 Earnings Update: A Capex Analysis

It’s Friday in earnings season, which means another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q3 earnings data from roughly 900 non-financial firms, and as a whole they show an impressive gain in net income from the year-ago period. Most other metrics are moving in the right direction, too.

Figure 1, below, tells the tale. 



Most notable is that plunge in restructuring charges you can see on the far left. Yes, restructuring charges have dropped a whopping 63 percent — but that’s because last year’s restructuring amount included a handful of enormous impairments from Intel ($INTC), AT&T ($T) and a few others. The decline we see this year is from an unusually large number one year ago.


Meanwhile, net income is up 28 percent and EBIT up 24 percent. Revenue is up 6.66 percent (rather apt for a Halloween Day update), which is still more than cost of goods sold, up 5.9 percent.


Big Spenders in Capex


The other impressive line-item this week is capex spending, up 30.7 percent from one year ago. Analysts love to scrutinize capex numbers because healthy capex spending — on buildings, vehicle fleets, data servers, and other long-term physical assets — means that companies are bullish on their future economic prospects.


So a 30.7 percent bump should be interpreted as good news, right? Not so fast.


Yes, capex spending so far this quarter is up $59.8 billion, yards ahead of where it was in Q3 2024 — but the vast majority of that spending (84 percent of it) is driven by only seven firms. Moreover, five of the seven are somehow involved in the AI data center arms race, and a sixth makes chips for those five. See Figure 2, below.



In other words, if we strip these seven big spenders out of our sample, overall capex spending for everyone else is only up 7.6 percent from 2024 numbers. That trend could change still more as earnings season continues to evolve (we’re not even one-third through it yet) so stay tuned. 


Choose Your Own Earnings Analysis Adventure


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.

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