Last Call on Q1 Earnings Updates

That’s all, folks — with earnings data from roughly 3,600 filers, including the last few giants such as Nvidia ($NVDA) and Walmart ($WMT), which both filed this week, we now call time on the Q1 2026 earnings season.

Overall, it was good.

Revenue was up 11 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 20.7 percent, and net income up 34.8 percent. Expense lines such as cost of goods sold, operating expense, and SG&A expense are all higher too, but none higher than the increase in revenue. Capex is up 29.5 percent although that number is skewed by the AI data center craze so we put an asterisk next to that one.

Figure 1, below, shows year-over-year change across 18 assorted line items.

Fun fact: Nvidia reported $58.32 billion in net income this week. If you omit that amount from all other net income this quarter (which was $585.1 billion), then the year-over-year gain would be only 21.4 percent, not the 34.8 percent we actually see in Figure 1, above.

Put another way, the 3,600 firms in our sample reported a collective year-over-year gain of $151.2 billion in net income. Thirty-eight percent of that gain comes from Nvidia alone.

We’ll do further analysis next week to assess just how much Nvidia and the other Big Tech firms are now carrying overall growth and performance for all U.S. filers — but clearly, it’s a lot.

Meanwhile, the table below shows the year-over-year change across 12 line items.

Metric Q1 2026 Q1 2025 Firm Count Percent Change
Revenue $5.2T $4.7T 3,097 11.0%
Cost Of Revenue $3.1T $2.8T 2,632 10.1%
Capex $431.1B $333.0B 2,630 29.5%
Operating Expenses $1.3T $1.2T 3,314 8.8%
SG&A Expense $692.1B $636.2B 3,369 8.8%
Operating Income $731.2B $608.0B 3,577 20.3%
Net Income $585.1B $433.9B 3,536 34.8%
Assets $31.9T $28.9T 3,549 10.5%
Cash $2.1T $1.9T 3,517 11.3%
Inventory $1.9T $1.7T 1,994 7.5%
Liabilities $19.6T $17.9T 3,528 9.8%
Total Debt $9.4T $8.6T 2,410 9.1%

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.

So that’s a wrap on Q1 2026 earnings. Enjoy the long weekend, and we’ll be back mid-July for our first look at Q2!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More on Depreciation Adjustments

Image
Last month we had a post in these pages about how Amazon ($AMZN) recently shortened the estimated useful lifespan of the computer servers it uses , which will have the practical effect of reducing operating income this year by some $700 million.  Now Bloomberg has pulled on that thread more strongly, with an in-depth look at how companies adjust the useful lifespan of assets they use . It turns out that numerous companies do this — sometimes extending the estimated lifespan, which can push net income up; and sometimes shortening the estimated lifespan, which pushes net income down. The key issue here is that as you shorten estimated lifespan, your annual depreciation charges increase; that’s what whittles down net income. The same principle runs in reverse, too: extending estimated lifespan spreads out depreciation across more years, so your annual depreciation is lower; that pushes net income up. Cynics will suspect that adjustments to estimated lifespan are simply a form of earn...
Read more

On Amazon and Server Lifespans

So there we were the other day, skimming the latest from Deep Quarry , a newsletter on financial statement analysis written by accounting aficionado Olga Usvyatsky.  She had been picking apart Amazon.com’s latest quarterly report , and noted that the e-commerce giant had revised the useful life of certain servers and networking equipment downward from six to five years. That change, Usvyatsky noted, will have the practical effect of reducing 2025 operating income by $700 million. Moreover, Amazon ($AMZN) also decided to retire some equipment early; that led to $920 million in accelerated depreciation in Q4 2024 and will reduce 2025 operating income by another $600 million. Wait a minute. The useful life of computer servers, why does that sound familiar…  Because Calcbench wrote about that exact issue in 2021!  Back then, we noted that Google ($GOOG) and Microsoft ($MSFT) had both extended the estimated life of their computer servers from three years to four, which had t...
Read more

Delta Kicks Off Q1 2025 Earnings Season

Image
Welcome back to earnings season, everyone! Delta Air Lines ($DAL) filed its Q1 2025 earnings release this morning — and with that data, we’re all back to the grind. Delta and all the other airlines always make for fun earnings analysis, because they’re a great example of the non-GAAP disclosures that companies make. Calcbench dutifully tracks those disclosures, and has automated templates ready to go for those who want the latest data pulled together and ready for analysis.  For example, our airline industry template automatically pulls disclosures such as revenue per available seat mile (RASM), cost per available seat mile (CASM), load factor (the higher it is, the more efficiently the airline is putting butts on seats), and even fuel consumed and average fuel price. Plus all the regular metrics like, ya know, revenue and EPS and that stuff.  Please beware that our airline template only works for people who (a) have installed the Calcbench Excel Add-in; and (b) are premium ...
Read more