Calcbench

Now that just about all S&P 500 firms have filed their Q2 earnings reports, let’s take a closer look at financial performance and economic trends hidden within those numbers. First up: capex spending. Capital expenditures are always a useful disclosure to observe because it helps analysts understand broader economic trends. If capex is rising, that means firms are confident enough in their business prospects to make more investments for long-term growth. If it’s falling, that suggests businesses are less confident about future growth and would rather preserve cash. The debate these days, of course, is whether capex spending for corporations as a whole is being distorted by a small number of tech firms spending zillions of dollars on AI data centers — and whether, if you strip those AI hyperscalers out of the analysis, capex spending is not as good as the overall number seems. So the Calcbench research team (read: intern trying to look busy) used our Multi-Company page to investiga...

Big tech stunned the world last week when Amazon ($AMZN) and Google ($GOOG) both filed 2025 earnings reports and also announced plans to spend astonishing amounts of money on data centers in 2026.  Their big bets came shortly after Meta ($META) and Microsoft ($MSFT) filed their own quarterly reports at the end of January, which also included plans for somewhat smaller but still staggering amounts of money going to data centers this year. The only one not yet disclosing fresh numbers is Oracle ($ORCL), but they’re scheduled to file their next earnings release on March 9, and we’ve already written about Oracle’s data center ambitions — and obligations — in the recent past.  So what does the biggest picture look like? Do the hyperscalers even have the cash to cover all these capex costs? We cracked open our Multi-Company page to take a look, tracking capex and operating cash flow by calendar quarter and then adding up those numbers by year, even though Microsoft and Oracle...

Last week President Trump declared that U.S. defense contractors had to stop spending money on dividends and share buyback programs so that the companies could redirect that money to expanding the country’s defense base. Calcbench takes no view on the political or legal practicalities of such a move, but it did make us wonder — how much money are we talking about here, anyway?  Thanks to our Bulk Data Query and Multi-Company pages, we quickly found the answer. Let’s start with six major defense contractors in the United States: RTX Corp. ($RTX) Lockheed Martin ($LMT) Northrop Grumman ($NOC) Huntington Ingalls ($HII) Leidos ($LDOS) General Dynamics ($GD) Using our Multi-Company page, we quickly found the amounts that each firm spent on capital expenditures, dividends, and share repurchases in 2024. See Figure 1, below. The amounts vary widely, depending on each firm’s overall size. Perhaps more important for financial analysis is to look at the relative spending among the t...

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...

Last month we had a post about capex spending among S&P 500 firms, and how capex spending seems to be rising briskly, but that spending is actually being driven by a few tech giants spending gobs of money on data centers for artificial intelligence.  Today we want to revisit that issue from a different angle: how is all that spending changing the nature of the tech giants’ balance sheets?  For many years, those balance sheets were notable for two basic traits: (a) lots of cash; and (b) lots of goodwill or other intangible assets. Physical assets — land, buildings, and equipment typically listed under the Property, Plant, and Equipment line item — accounted for a relatively small part of the tech giants’ overall assets.  Well, that’s changing. Figure 1, below, shows the ratio of “PP&E” assets versus total assets for four tech giants leading the AI arms race: Amazon ($AMZN), Google ($GOOG), Meta ($META), and Microsoft ($MSFT).  As you can see, the ratio f...