Calcbench

Another week, another batch of somewhat favorable earnings data from Corporate America. The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker now has Q2 data from more than 2,300 non-financial firms — and in the aggregate, you can’t find too much that warrants gloom, panic, or hyperventilating. Figure 1, below, shows the big picture.  Revenue, operating income, and net income are all up from the year-ago period, which is good. At the same time, important line items to understand operation costs — cost of revenue, SG&A Expense, and operating expense — are all up too, although not quite as much as revenue and income numbers.  So despite all the pressures of tariffs, inflation, a sluggish job market, and other economic uncertainty, Corporate America is keeping its nose above water. That’s enough to declare victory at the end of a workweek. That said, remember our earnings update from last Friday, where we noted that a relatively small number of large firms accounted for essentially all the r...

As regular readers of this blog know, from time to time Calcbench examines the revenues that pharmaceutical companies receive from their so-called “blockbuster” drugs — that is, the companies’ biggest-selling products, which typically are reported as individual operating segments. Today we wanted to examine a bigger issue: the total portfolio of blockbuster drugs that pharmaceutical companies manage, and how those individual revenue streams evolve over time. That is, a pharma company might depend for years on one blockbuster drug, but as that product approaches the end of patent protection or faces new competition from a rival, the pharma company will need to bring new blockbusters to market to succeed the old one.  To explore that question, we looked at individual drug sales at four large pharma companies — AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer — from Q1 2020 to Q2 2025. The results are presented in four figures, below. First is AbbVie ($ABBV).  Next up is Johnso...

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 fir...

Five of the six major U.S. airlines have now filed their Q2 earnings reports, so it’s time for another quick stop in the land of earnings analysis. As we’ve said before, we love airline earnings data because the airlines report several fascinating non-GAAP financial performance metrics, such as total revenue per available seat mile (TRASM), load factor (the percentage of seats sold), and average fuel price per gallon. Calcbench tracks all that stuff! Subscribers can even use our airline industry template to track the latest earnings data as the airlines file it! For example, Figure 1, below, tracks TRASM for the six major U.S. carriers for the last five years.  As you can see, the airlines suffered a disastrous decline in TRASM during the 2020 pandemic year, then made a remarkable climb back to normalcy in the first half of 2022. All six have flown onward at roughly the same levels since then, each one fluctuating in a relatively narrow band.  Now compare TRASM to the more tra...

Welcome to second-quarter earnings season, everyone! We now have several hundred corporate earnings releases neatly indexed in the Calcbench databases, so it’s time to bring back our famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker! Each week from now until the end of August, Calcbench will crunch the earnings numbers of non-financial companies and compare that performance to the numbers from one year ago. As of this morning, July 25, we already have data for roughly 350 non-financial firms. As one might expect at this early juncture, the picture is mixed. Revenue is up a few percentage points, and operating income and net income are both up by a few points more; that’s good.  On the other hand, capex, opex, and SG&A expense (sales, general, and administrative) are all up a few points more than revenue too. That could suggest inflationary pressures are starting to hit corporations, but cost of goods sold — which would typically be the clearest indicator of inflation pressures — didn’t rise f...

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman ($NOC) filed its second-quarter earnings release on Tuesday, which gives us yet another chance to indulge in our favorite hobby — segment-level financial analysis! In this instance, we wanted to look at order backlog. We’ve written previously about order backlog at defense contractors , comparing numbers among Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and RTX Corp. Today we wanted to focus specifically on funded versus unfunded backlog.  As defined by Northrop, funded backlog represents firm orders for which an entity has authorized and appropriated funding; unfunded backlog are those orders that have been placed, but funding hasn’t yet been appropriated.  Backlog is a valuable detail to know, since it helps analysts understand a defense contractor’s long-term revenue pipeline and the possible risks to it. Hence Northrop discloses its backlog by operating segment — but you do have to look for it; the information is tucked away on Page 14 of the...

Second quarter earnings releases are now picking up steam, and as the volume of filings continues to accelerate in coming weeks, analysts are bound to start seeing more disclosures about the economic effects of tariffs.  To be clear, companies don’t need to file any formal disclosure about tariffs under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles; and in the two dozen or so Q2 2025 earnings releases we’ve already seen , a majority of filers aren’t saying anything specific about tariffs.  At the same time, however, nothing in federal securities law forbids a company from making a disclosure about tariffs either, and some filers have done so. Let’s take a look at some of the interesting ones we’ve seen so far.  One example is aluminum maker Alcoa ($AA), which filed its Q2 earnings release on July 16 . The company reported paying $115 million in tariff costs for importing aluminum from Canada into the United States: In the second quarter 2025, Alcoa incurred approximate...