The Walmart-Symbotic Seesaw Continues

Everyone might be gushing over Nvidia’s ($NVDA) earnings report released earlier this week, but Calcbench is feeling a bit brick-and-mortar today. 

So we’re going to look at Walmart ($WMT) instead, to revisit one of our favorite subjects these days: Walmart’s holdings in warehouse automation firm Symbotic ($SYM) and how those holdings affect Walmart’s earnings per share.


We’ve written about this relationship before. Three months ago, Walmart reported EPS of $0.53 — but in a tiny footnote tucked away on Page 33 of the earnings release, Walmart said that Symbotic’s poor share performance that quarter had pulled down EPS by $0.21. 


If you exclude that equity adjustment from net income, you’d have a non-GAAP adjusted EPS of $0.74. That’s what Walmart did, also on Page 33 of its earnings release that quarter. 


OK, that was then; Walmart just filed its latest earnings release today for the quarter ending April 30. So what has changed? 


For starters, Symbotic’s share price went up. Shares rose from $54.37 at end of January to $58.89 at the end of April. That led to a gain of $275 million in Walmart’s Other Gains/Losses line item, which translates into a boost of $0.02 for EPS. (Technically a gain of $0.03, offset by a cut of $0.01 for tax issues, resulting in a net increase of $0.02)


Walmart’s actual EPS is $0.67 for the quarter. Including one other adjustment for reorganizations, adjusted EPS was $0.66 — and yes, as usual, the explanation was tucked away onto Page 33 of the earnings release. 


Figure 1, below, shows Walmart’s Other Gains/Losses line item for the last eight fiscal quarters. Remember, in the topsy-turvy world of Other Gains/Losses accounting, a negative number is actually a gain in other income; a positive number is a loss. 



To make matters even more complicated, those gains portrayed on the income statement as a negative number push EPS upward. 


That’s what we see in fiscal Q4 2026. Symbotic’s share price tumbled sharply, going from $80.95 to $54.37 in the quarter. That led to a big loss on Walmart’s Other Gains/Losses line, which pushed EPS downward by $0.21, and Walmart included a non-GAAP adjustment pushing EPS back upward.


This quarter, everything ran pretty much in reverse, albeit to a lesser extent. 


Looking further back, Symbotic saw a big run-up in share price across 2025, going from $26.74 in May 2025 to a high of nearly $90 by last November. That explains those two huge gains in fiscal Q2 and Q3 of last year, even though Figure 1 displays them as a negative number. 


Our point: that Other Gains/Losses can be a significant part of overall net income and EPS, and in many instances those are little more than paper profits that arise from equity holdings with wildly fluctuating share prices. We also touched on this with Nvidia just the other day, another large company known for equity stakes in other businesses. 


It’s all in the footnotes, people. That’s why Calcbench loves geeking out over this stuff.

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