Calcbench Blog

Today we want to return to our world-famous Calcbench earnings template, a spreadsheet we use to track companies’ quarterly financial performance as they file their earnings releases. We last peeked at this template on Feb. 2, when Q4 filings had just started to arrived.

We now have hundreds of filings from the S&P 500, giving us a much more complete picture of how Corporate America is doing. So far it seems to be doing pretty good. 

As you can see in Figure 1, below, which reflects earnings reports filed through Feb. 16, both revenue and net income for Q4 2023 rose from their year-earlier periods. 

Even more interesting, however, is that the cost of goods sold was essentially flat compared to the year-earlier period, at just under $1.5 trillion for the whole group. 

Let’s remember, the markets threw a mini-meltdown last week when the Consumer Price Index rose 0.3 percent in January from December prices. That was higher than expected, and suggested that inflation might not be fading as quickly as people had assumed, and then everyone freaked out.

Perhaps January prices were higher compared to Q4 2023. Perhaps those price pressures will level off in February and March, and cost of goods sold for Q1 2024 (when those numbers start to arrive in late April) will look as flat as they do in Figure 1. Perhaps the cost of supplies is flat for corporations, and prices are rising because companies are trying to squeeze consumers — the so-called “greedflation” theory that has plenty of traction in some business press. 

Banks have been reporting their Q4 earnings at a brisk pace lately, and already we have more than 260 earnings reports to study — and as much as everyone loves to talk about commercial real estate lately (including Calcbench in a recent post) today we want to talk about net interest margin. 

Net interest margin is the spread between the interest rate it pays on customer deposits and the interest rate it receives from loans. For example, when a bank extends loans at 8 percent and pays 5 percent to depositors, the net interest margin is 3 percent. 

So what have net interest margins been doing lately? See Figure 1, below.

As you can see, net interest margin spiked in 2022, as banks raised their rates on new loans (keeping pace with the Federal Reserve’s punishing rate increases that year) but held rates on deposits low. 

By late 2023, however, the Fed had stopped its rate hikes. Loan rates stabilized, and net interest margins narrowed to an average of 3.22 percent reported in Q4 2023— almost exactly where they were at the start of 2021, 3.23 percent. 

So, what does this mean? Are depositors getting wiser and demanding better rates on their savings accounts? Are banks responding to that pressure by raising depositor rates, which therefore narrows the net margin? 

You can answer those questions if you know where to look in the earnings release and the quarterly filings. Calcbench specializes in data that can be found deep within both: average interest rates, deposit volumes, loan performance metrics, and more. (We have a report on banks’ non-performing assets coming soon, for example.)

For the curious, we offer Figure 2, below, which shows the banks with the largest and smallest net interest margins, and how those margins have fluctuated over the last two years.

Spirit AeroSystems, a crucial supplier to aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus, filed its year-end 2023 earnings report this week. The report offers some fascinating disclosures that can help analysts understand how Spirit’s performance might be affected by the struggles Boeing is having these days with its 737 jets. 

As you probably already know, Boeing ($BA) suffered yet another safety and publicity mishap on Jan. 5, when a door on one of its 737 Max jets blew off the fuselage mid-flight. That fuselage was manufactured by Spirit AeroSystems ($SPR).

Investigators believe the door that flew off this specific flight — an Alaska Airlines ($ALK) flight from Oregon to California — was first delivered intact to Boeing, where technicians then removed it from the fuselage and perhaps re-attached it improperly; so perhaps this specific failure can’t be attributed to Spirit. On the other hand, Spirit shareholders filed a lawsuit against the company in 2023 alleging “widespread quality failures.” 

How will all this get resolved by air safety regulators? Calcbench doesn’t know. But we did take a close look at Spirit’s earnings release, which paints a rather detailed picture of the financial ties between Boeing and Spirit.

For example, Figure 1, below, shows the pace of Spirit’s “shipset deliveries” (that is, the number of aircraft) grouped by type of aircraft.

If you do the math, Airbus accounts for 51 percent of Spirit’s aircraft deliveries in all of 2023 — but Boeing started to close the gap by Q4 2023, when it accounted for 33.4 percent of all Spirit deliveries versus 49 percent for Airbus.

Even better is that Spirit reports the number of deliveries per type of aircraft, including the 737. Using our “Show Tag History” feature, we then looked at the number of 737 deliveries per quarter for the last four years. See Figure 2, below.

Boeing had made the 737 Max a linchpin of growth plans in the 2010s, until it suffered two crashes in 2018 that cost more than 300 lives. Sales of the Max had just begun to recover from that disaster when this new incident with the door struck. So what will Q1 2024 deliveries look like? Only time will tell, but Calcbench does let you track disclosures at that level of detail!

What About the Money? 

Spirit also reports revenue and earnings for several operating segments. One of them is a Commercial segment, which includes the Boeing 737 and other aircraft types mentioned in Figure 1, above. Those revenues arrived at $1.52 billion in Q4 2023. 

We again used our Show Tag History feature to chart Spirit’s commercial revenues for the last four years. See Figure 3, below. (Note the swift plunge in Q2 2020 when the pandemic struck.)

What we don’t know from these disclosures is how much Spirit’s commercial revenues depend on Boeing deliveries, and deliveries of the 737 specifically. Yes, Boeing accounts for roughly one-third of aircraft deliveries lately; but one-third of deliveries doesn’t necessarily mean one-third of all revenue. For example, it might well be the case that Airbus aircraft are more expensive, and account for an outsized share of that $1.52 billion.

Yes, yes: everybody knows that the economy is humming along these days and corporate earnings are doing well — but precisely how well, you ask? We have some data for you.

Calcbench has been tracking Q4 earnings among the S&P 500, pulling in data as companies file. (As recently as Friday morning, a few hours before this post, when Bristol Myers Squibb ($BMY) filed its earnings at 7:47 a.m.) 

The result is Figure 1, below, which compares the collective year-over-year Q4 earnings for 212 firms in the S&P 500 that have filed so far. 

Because we’re dealing with such large amounts, perhaps showing the data in table format might be helpful too. See Figure 2. 

So revenue drifted upward only 2.69 percent, but net income shot up 14.36 percent. (This is GAAP-approved net income, by the way, not the non-GAAP adjusted earnings that can be framed in very flattering light.) 

Tech giants Microsoft ($MSFT) and Google ($GOOG) both filed their latest quarterly earnings releases on Tuesday — giving us an excellent opportunity to showcase how Calcbench can help you dive into the details of their operating segment performance. Lots of charts and tables coming up!

For example, we looked at the segment-level disclosures in Microsoft’s earnings release, which Calcbench lets you export into Excel. With just a few keystrokes that led to Figure 1, below, which lets us see which of Microsoft’s many lines of business grew the most year over year. 

With just a few more keystrokes we then turned that table into a bar chart, see in Figure 2. (We dropped Microsoft’s smaller lines of business from this chart since they were so small compared to the larger ones.)

The above images relied on our “Export Table” function, which you can see when you hold your cursor over just about any footnote disclosure. We also have our “Export Tag History” function, which lets you export the data for one specific line item over time. We used that to conjure up Figure 3, below, which shows revenue for Microsoft’s LinkedIn subsidiary.

We’re not sure what that upward trend says about the white-collar job market these days — but clearly it tells something, and Calcbench lets you find that information double quick.

Now let’s switch to Google’s latest earnings release. Within a few minutes of that release arriving at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Calcbench had already indexed all the disclosures for presentation in our databases. For example, Figure 4, below, shows Google’s segment disclosures in our Company-in-Detail database.

You could then visit our Interactive Disclosure page to view the actual tables for Google’s segment-level disclosure as filed in the 10-K. Figure 5:

You might remember that several weeks ago Calcbench previewed our airline earrings analysis tool, an Excel template we cooked up to study earnings and other key performance metrics in the airline industry. 

Well, all major U.S. airlines have now reported their Q4 2023 earnings, and we’re happy to say our template worked like a charm. Here’s a quick chart tracking total revenue per available seat mile — TRASM, a crucial metric for airline performance — since the start of 2020. 

If you are a Professional-level Calcbench subscriber and have installed the Calcbench Excel Add-In, all you need to do is download our template from DropBox. The template will then automatically pull the latest quarterly data as the airlines file earnings reports. 

TRASM isn’t the only metric our template tracks, either. You can get automatic updates on… 

TRASM, or total revenue per available seat mile

CASM, costs per available seat mile

Load factor, which is the percentage of seating capacity filled by customers

Fuel consumed

Average fuel cost per gallon

Percentage of revenue coming from passengers

EPS

Calcbench has been using this template internally for a while now, such as when we looked at fuel costs for five major airlines last October or when we looked at RASM for those same five airlines last July. We are happy to share it far and wide. (Although the template won’t work unless you have a Professional-level subscription. If you’d like to inquire with us about that, email [email protected].)

Like everyone else on the planet, Calcbench has been relieved to see the covid-19 pandemic recede into the background of daily life. Now, however, Johnson & Johnson’s latest earnings report gives us a glimpse of what that fade means for corporate earnings.

J&J ($JNJ) filed its earnings report on Tuesday morning. As we skimmed through the company’s segment disclosures, we noticed an odd detail. J&J had established a new “Innovative Medicine” operating segment, but reported that segment’s numbers “excluding covid-19 vaccines.” 

We’re pretty open-minded about adjustments to earnings around here, but really? Has the decline in covid vaccination business declined so much, so swiftly, that an adjustment is warranted? Come to think of it, how much did covid vaccinations support J&J earnings, anyway? 

It’s all there in the filings — if you know where to look. 

Let’s start with that Innovative Medicine operating segment. Johnson & Johnson defined that segment last summer when the company spun off its consumer health business into Kenvue ($KVUE) in third-quarter 2023. Today’s Innovative Medicine segment had previously been the Pharmaceutical segment, and in the 10-Q J&J now reports the U.S., international, and worldwide revenue for its blockbuster drugs. Pretty cool, actually. See Figure 1, below, for a small sample of what J&J discloses.

Further down that segment report, one sees that J&J reported only $41 million in worldwide revenue for its covid-19 vaccine in Q3 2023 — and all of that revenue came from international sales; J&J reported zero revenue from the United States. Even more jarring, that $41 million in sales was down 91.5 percent from $489 million in the year-earlier period.

OK, those Q3 2023 numbers do establish that J&J’s covid vaccine revenue has been plummeting. Now let’s look at those Q4 numbers filed today.

Covid-19 Revenue and Cost

First, we can see from the Q4 earnings release that the Innovative Medicine segment reported a total of $13.722 billion for the quarter, up 4.2 percent from the year-earlier period in 2022. See Figure 2, below.

Immediately below those line items, we have Innovative Medicine “excluding covid-19 vaccination.” That totalled $13.678 billion for the quarter, which is $44 million less than the $13.722 billion reported in the previous line item.

So that’s how much covid-19 revenue J&J had for Q4 2023: $44 million, compared to (if you do that same math again for Q4 2022 numbers) $689 million in the year-earlier period. That’s a drop of 93 percent. Ouch.

Meanwhile, we also have covid-19 related costs for J&J. The company reports those in the earnings release too, as part of its reconciliation table to square adjusted earnings ($5.56 billion) back to GAAP-approved net earnings ($4.13 billion). See Figure 3, below. The covid costs are highlighted in gray.

As you can see, the company reported a $10 million adjustment related to covid this quarter, down from an $821 million adjustment one year ago. Those costs, the company says in a footnote, stem from “external manufacturing network exit costs and required clinical trial expenses, associated with the company's completion of its COVID-19 vaccine contractual commitments.”

So, clearly, J&J is winding down covid-19 vaccination as a substantial part of its operations. And for those who want to see a history of J&J’s covid revenue since the company first started reporting it at the beginning of 2021, see the rather astonishing Figure 4, below.

More on Calcbench and Pharma Revenue

If following the pharma sector is your thing in financial analysis, don’t forget that large pharma companies report their sales of blockbuster drugs. Calcbench first looked at this corner of financial disclosure in 2018 and then provided a fresh look in 2021. You can use our Segments reporting database to research sales of specific drugs. 

And for Calcbench premium customers, we even have a pharma industry earnings analysis template that uses our Excel Add-in to pull the latest revenue on blockbuster drug sales automatically. 

One simmering risk in the economy these days is the commercial real estate market. Vacancy rates for office space are at an all-time high, and many owners of commercial real estate face painfully high refinancing rates. That could lead to a market meltdown.

So Calcbench wondered: What are the risks to banks that carry commercial real estate loans on their books? 

That question is not hard to answer if you have the right tools and know where to look — like, say, by using Calcbench. We offer an example below.

We pulled up the commercial real estate loans reported by 25 large banks in their 2022 annual reports, and compared those holdings (which are listed on the balance sheet as an asset) against total assets for that year. Figure 1, below, shows the 10 largest holders of commercial real estate that we found.

OK, that’s kinda cool, but for financial analysts the most important column is the one on the far right: the ratio of commercial real estate loans to total assets. The higher that percentage is, the bigger the threat to stockholder equity if commercial restate takes a nasty turn and banks need to start writing down those holdings.

So Figure 2, below, ranks the banks based on that ratio.

As you can see, none of the country’s largest banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo) are on this list. On the other hand, Valley National Bank ($VLY) has both a lot of commercial real estate holdings and the highest ratio of commercial real estate exposure to total assets. That’s quite a thing, given today’s economic climate.

How this matters now

We offer the above tables as an example of the research you can conduct, although most of these specific banks might not be all that interesting. Large banks don’t have a high exposure to commercial real estate; the smaller ones (in SIC code 6022, if you must know) typically have more exposure. 

And, of course, these numbers are nearly a year old. As 2023 annual reports arrive in coming weeks, you’ll find the latest numbers on commercial real estate holdings tucked away in the banks’ loan disclosures. You’ll be able to pull that up using our Interactive Disclosures tool. For example, here is the disclosure for Valley National Bank, with the commercial real estate high-lighted in gray:

Fourth-quarter 2023 earnings will start to arrive this week, and one early filer is Delta Air Lines ($DAL), which will announce earnings on Jan. 12. That gives us an excellent opportunity to remind everyone of Calcbench’s ability to study earnings data in detail, using airlines as the example.

Earlier this year we cooked up a template to study earnings and key performance metrics in the airline industry. The template is a spreadsheet that Calcbench subscribers can use to track numerous disclosures that matter in the airline sector, including:

RASM, or revenue per available seat mile

CASM, costs per available seat mile

Load factor, which is the percentage of seating capacity filled by customers

Fuel consumed

Average fuel cost per gallon

Percentage of revenue coming from passengers

EPS

Calcbench has been using this template internally for a while now, such as when we looked at fuel costs for five major airlines last October or when we looked at RASM for those same five airlines last July. 

In anticipation of Q4 earnings, which should arrive from all the majors over the next three weeks, we used our template to look at RASM yet again for major airlines: Delta, American Airlines (AAL), United Airlines (UAL), Alaska Airlines (ALK), JetBlue (JBLU) and Southwest (LUV). See Figure 1, below.

Delta, in green, has been pulling away from its competitors for a while now. That’s also what the data told us last July, and we’ll be curious to see whether the pattern continues in Q4 results. 

On the other hand, how neatly does high RASM translate into EPS performance? Perhaps not all that much. Figure 2, below, compares quarterly EPS, and if you can see a clear outlier in those numbers, your analytical eyesight is better than ours; these results are all over the map.

So how can you take advantage of our airlines analysis template? Follow these simple steps.

Be a Calcbench professional-level subscriber. 

Install the Calcbench Excel Add-In. 

Download our template from DropBox.

That’s it, really. As Q4 data arrives, it will automatically populate in the template and your analysis is as current as can be.

Today we want to pull on a thread mentioned in our last blog post about corporate debt, where a Barron’s article had cited Calcbench research and noted that “smaller companies are more likely to issue convertible debt” as a way to avoid higher interest expenses.

Well, convertible debt seems to be our first financial fad of 2024, since the Financial Times also just ran an article about how “U.S. companies have been piling into the market for convertible bonds as they search for ways to keep their interest costs down.”

So today we offer a refresher course on what companies disclose about convertible debt that they issue, and how you can research such disclosures on Calcbench.

Convertible debt is a bond or some similar note that can be swapped for company shares when the company’s stock price hits an agreed-upon level. Typically this debt carries a lower interest rate than standard debt, so it’s a way for companies raising debt to keep their interest expense low. That feature can be mighty attractive these days, as so many companies are refinancing low-interest rate loans issued in the 2010s at today’s much higher rates. 

OK, enough of the abstract stuff. How do you find the gritty details in Calcbench? 

As usual, one good place to start is the Multi-Company Page. Here you can find amounts of convertible debt disclosed by one or more companies that you follow; simply identify the peer group you want to research and type “convertible debt” into our Standard Metrics field. 

We pulled up convertible debt disclosed by non-financial companies with annual revenue of at least $100 million, then sorted from largest amount to smallest. The result is Figure 1, below.

As you can see, many of the largest issuers of convertible debt tend to be tech companies (and often life sciences companies too) that need lots of cash to fund high-growth expansions. 

An Example of Convertible Debt Details

We randomly selected Akamai Technologies ($AKAM), which reported $2.28 billion in convertible debt at the end of 2022, and used our Interactive Disclosure tool to research where that $2.28 billion figure came from. Digging into the Debt footnote disclosure from Akamai’s 2022 10-K report, we found that Akamai issued two tranches of convertible debt in recent years.

First was $1.15 billion of convertible senior notes issued in 2018 and due in 2025. The notes have an interest rate of 0.125 percent (wow), and each $1,000 of principal can be converted into 10.515 shares of Akamai, which is equivalent to a conversion price of roughly $95.10 per share. 

Now we get to the important part. Under what circumstances can debt holders convert their notes into Akamai shares at that $95.10 conversion price? Because if those circumstances come to pass and the debt holders exercise their conversion rights, that could dilute the value of shares owned by others. 

That’s something a financial analyst should want to know. If you own shares in Company A and it issues lots of convertible debt, you want to know the conditions upon which debt holders can convert the debt into equity — and then build models and alerts to track those circumstances, so a dilution event won’t catch you by surprise.

Thankfully, the footnote disclosures describe those conversion situations in detail. Let’s just excerpt straight from the 10-K:

At their option, holders may convert their 2025 Notes prior to the close of business on the business day immediately preceding January 1, 2025, only under the following circumstances: During any calendar quarter commencing after the calendar quarter ended June 30, 2018 (and only during such calendar quarter), if the last reported sale price of the Company's common stock for at least 20 trading days (whether or not consecutive) during the period of 30 consecutive trading days ending on, and including, the last trading day of the immediately preceding calendar quarter is greater than or equal to 130% of the conversion price on each applicable trading day; During the five business day period after any five consecutive trading day period in which the trading price per $1,000 principal amount of 2025 Notes for each trading day of the measurement period was less than 98% of the product of the last reported sale price of the Company's common stock and the conversion rate on each such trading day. On or after January 1, 2025, holders may convert all or any portion of their 2025 Notes at any time prior to the close of business on the second scheduled trading day immediately preceding the maturity date, regardless of the foregoing circumstances.

We should add that Akamai issued another $1.15 billion in convertible notes in 2019, payable in 2027 and carrying an interest rate of 0.375 percent. Each $1,000 of principal for those notes can be converted into 8.607 shares, which is roughly $116.18 per share. Akamai’s footnotes then list the various circumstances where holders of this debt can convert their holdings into shares. 

For the record, Akamai’s share price in May 2018 (when the first round of convertible debt was issued) was roughly $76 per share. In August 2019 (when the second round was issued) the share price was around $87 per share. 

The question for debt buyers at the time (2018 and 2019) was whether they believed Akamai shares would trade higher than the conversion prices ($95 and $116, respectively) by the time 2025 and 2027 roll around. If so, then maybe it’s worth putting up with those ultra-low interest rate payments in exchange for a great conversion price in another few years. 

As of this week, Akamai shares were around $115. 

Go forth and research

Of course, many more companies carry convertible debt too, with a wide range of conversion prices and scenarios. We only picked Akamai as one example to show you the research that’s possible. 

Happy New Year, dedicated Calcbench users. We begin 2024 with another look at what might be the most perilous financial issue of the year to come: refinancing of corporate debt at higher interest rates. 

The latest analysis comes from Barron’s, which last week reviewed debt levels among the S&P 500 and speculated on whether higher interest rate costs will lead to widespread layoffs in the corporate world. (Spoiler: no, for various economic reasons.) Barron’s cited previous Calcbench research looking at 55 non-financial firms in the S&P 500, who collectively have $105 billion coming due this year with an average interest rate of 2.75 percent. 

The odds that those 55 firms will be able to refinance their debt at those sub-3 percent levels are slim. They’ll need to either repay that debt, which would be a hit to cash holdings; or refinance the debt at today’s higher rates, which will drive up operating costs and potentially squeeze net income. 

How companies avoid the refinance trap will be a dominant question in financial analysis for at least the first half of 2024 — but it is not a new question. Indeed, Calcbench first explored the refinancing trap one year ago, with a five-part series on who owed how much to whom, and at what rates.

We won’t recap that whole series here, but we did want to call out one specific post about where to find debt disclosures in the Calcbench data archives. 

If you want data from a group of companies, one place to start is our Multi-Company page. First, select the group of companies you want to research. (We have an entire post dedicated to creating a peer group if you need a refresher.) Once that group is set, you can choose from any number of debt-related disclosures we include in our Standardized Metrics field on the left-hand side. Those disclosures include:

Total debt

Short-, long-, and medium-term debt

Floating-rate debt

Debt-to-equity ratio

Interest payable

Interest expense

For one specific company, you can use the Company-in-Detail page, you can research what the company reports on the income statement and the balance sheet. This approach is somewhat hit or miss, because not all companies report interest expenses on the income statement — although all companies do report debt on the balance sheet. You can then trace the disclosures for the company you follow and see what it reports in the footnotes.

You can also get a global sense of a company’s debt disclosures using our Segments, Rollfowards & Breakouts page. Start by selecting the specific company you want to research. Then select “Debt Instruments” from the pull-down menu of dataset options  on the left side of the screen. Be warned, you’re likely to get lots of data in the results!

Lots of financial analysts and other Calcbench users might be wishing they could sail away on a tropical cruise as we enter the holiday slow season, so perhaps it’s a good time to visit Carnival Corp. ($CCL) and the company’s latest financial performance. 

Carnival filed its latest quarterly (and fiscal year-end) earnings release on Thursday, and top-line numbers looked pretty good for a company still recovering from the pandemic’s apocalyptic effects four years ago. Quarterly revenue jumped 40.6 percent from the year-ago period, to $5.4 billion; annual revenue soared 77.5 percent to $21.6 billion. 

But wait, we have even more revenue detail! Thanks to several nifty GAAP and non-GAAP disclosures that Carnival makes, we can also determine whether cruise passengers are paying more per ticket and spending more once they’re onboard. 

Let’s first look at the revenue disclosures. Tucked away in the earnings release is a breakdown of where that $5.4 billion revenue number comes from. See Figure 1, below.

Further down, Carnival also discloses several non-GAAP metrics under the heading “Statistical Information”— including the number of passengers carried. See Figure 2, below.

Note that last item, passengers carried. So if we use Calcbench’s Nobel-prize winning “Show tag history” feature, which lets us see previous disclosures for the same line item, we can divide the number of passengers into passenger ticket revenue, and calculate ticket revenue per passenger. 

Calcbench did exactly that, starting from first-quarter 2021 through this latest quarter, ending Nov. 30. The results are in Figure 3, below.

For those who don’t want to squint at the blue line, ticket revenue per passenger went from $600 in Q1 2021 ($3 million in revenue from 5,000 passengers) to $1,132 at the end of 2023 ($3.51 billion in revenue from 3.1 million passengers).

There’s also that “Onboard and Other” revenue segment, which was $1.9 billion for the most recent quarter. We’re not entirely sure what goes into that line item. Carnival doesn’t say, either in the earnings release or the more fulsome Management Discussion & Analysis disclosures made in the 10-Q. Clearly some of that revenue comes from passenger spending onboard the ships; the “other” category likely includes travel insurance or other ancillary products Carnival sells to passengers even when they’re on dry land. 

To make matters even more interesting, Carnival had more onboard-and-other revenue than passenger ticket revenue in the beginning of 2021, so average onboard-and-other revenue per passenger was sky-high in that period — and then plunged as more passengers returned to the high seas, pushing average spend down. 

We charted the numbers out anyway, dropping the first two quarters of 2021 since they skewed the curve for the rest of the data. See Figure 4, below.

Overall, Carnival seems to have weathered the pandemic storm and is now sailing toward brighter shores. And for financial analysts, it’s yet another example of how you can dig up a treasure trove of insight from the earnings release and Calcbench database powers!

Everyone likes to say cash is king, so we have mixed news on that front from the Calcbench macro-economic analysis department: plenty of companies have been generating more cash from operations in the last few years, despite the pandemic and inflation.

And plenty of companies then watched that cash fly out the window, thanks to the pandemic and inflation.

Here’s what happened. Like so many others these days, the Calcbench research team was wondering whether the economy has been sliding toward recession or even already is in recession. So we assembled a group of more than 1,800 non-financial companies with at least $100 million in annual revenue; and then studied average cash flow from operations since 2019. See Figure 1, below.

OK, that’s not bad. It tells us that a broad swath of the economy is generating more cash from what that business actually does — not from financing or investing; from bread-and-butter operations. Even 2023 numbers, which only capture the first three quarters of last year, are trending in the right direction.

Next question: where is that money going? Is it being saved or invested? To answer that question, we looked at average cash and equivalents for that same group of companies. See Figure 2, below.

OK, no surprises here. Average cash holdings popped in 2020 as everyone stocked up on cash to endure the pandemic, and have been trending downward ever since. So companies are not saving these greater amounts of cash they’re generating. 

Indeed, if you examine cash on a quarter-to-quarter basis (not shown here, but we did peek at those numbers) you’d see a vertiginous plunge in cash during the first half of 2022 as inflation surprised everyone and caused expenses to soar. 

On the other hand, average cash across the three quarters of 2023 hovered around $850 million. In coming weeks, we might see that everyone had a great Q4 and cash for the whole year rose; we don’t yet know. 

Of course, Figure 2 above doesn’t necessarily mean companies were spending down cash levels. In theory, they could have diverted that cash to investing or financing activities, which could also explain lower cash levels on the balance sheet. 

To clarify that picture, then, we also examined average operating expenses across the same not quite five-year period. See Figure 3, below.

Notice the jump upward in 2022. It’s a clear indicator that even as companies were generating more cash from operations (good), that extra cash went right into higher operating expenses. 

Is all hope lost? Well, let’s check the bottom line. Figure 4, below, shows average net income for our sample group.

Clearly net income rose sharply in 2021, but that’s more a recovery in net income from the low, pandemic-induced floor established in 2020. Once the economy stabilized at the end of 2021, however, average net income didn’t really improve from 2021 to 2022 — and we’d need to have a gangbusters Q4 for 2023 average net income to sail past 2022. 

What does all this mean for the future? Calcbench doesn’t know. We’re encouraged by all these numbers moving in good directions in latter 2023, which supports the broader story these days that the economy is healthy overall. Still, there’s lots to wonder about when you dig deeper into the data.

So there we were today, scanning the latest corporate filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, when we noticed that Johnson Controls ($JCI) had filed its latest earnings report. 

We started reading, and were immediately stopped short by this earnings adjustment, right there in the second bullet point: 

Fiscal Q4 GAAP EPS of $0.80; Q4 Adjusted EPS of $1.05, including a $0.04 headwind from the cyber incident.

Hold up — what cybersecurity incident? When did that happen, and what has Johnson Controls said about it so far? (Calcbench regrets to admit that with cybersecurity attacks happening so often these days, our crack research team doesn't always notice every one.) 

We read the rest of Johnson’s earnings release, and to our surprise found that the company provided no further discussion of exactly what the cyber incident was. Clearly the incident was material; the company reported $549 million in net income attributable to Johnson, and $0.80 EPS. If the cyber incident reduced EPS by $0.04, that implies a cost of $27.3 million.

A quick scan of Johnson’s recent 8-K filings began filling in the details. According to one filing on Sept. 27, the company “has experienced disruptions in portions of its internal information technology infrastructure and applications resulting from a cybersecurity incident.” 

Johnson provided few other details, and ended with a bland, “The Company is assessing whether the incident will impact its ability to timely release its fourth quarter and full fiscal year results, as well as the impact to its financial results.”

The company provided an update on Nov. 13 with much more detail. The incident was a ransomware attack that hackers had launched against Johnson the week of Sept. 23, and which disrupted various parts of Johnson’s IT systems. (By then the cybersecurity media had also reported various details about the attack, including that overseas attackers had stolen terabytes of data and demanded a $51 million ransom.) 

By Nov. 29, Johnson Controls announced that it would be late filing its quarterly report (for fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year results ending on Sept. 30). Those late results are what arrived this morning in the earnings release. 

Perhaps we’ll see more information about the cyber incident whenever Johnson Controls files its full 10-K. We can’t say exactly when that will be, but for comparison purposes, Johnson had a 12-day gap between earnings release and 10-K in 2022. 

We also can’t help but notice that Johnson issued no press release about its attack or the consequent effect on operations, earnings, or filings. Hence it’s so important to read the filings and all the fine print in them — because that’s where you’re likely to see the juicy details, such as a cyber attack cutting quarterly EPS by a material amount.

The Clorox Comparison

OK, so Johnson Controls reported earnings adjusted for a cybersecurity attack. We wondered: how have other companies treated major attacks in their earnings reports? 

One primary example is Clorox Corp. ($CLX) which suffered a hugely disruptive ransomware attack in August. The company’s first 8-K filing on Aug. 14 reported the attack with typical sparse detail. By Oct. 4, however, Clorox filed a preliminary earnings release with a painfully extensive update on the damage. 

Most notably, Clorox reported an estimated GAAP loss of $0.35 to $0.75 EPS — and an attack-adjusted EPS of $0.00 to $0.40. So Johnson Controls isn’t alone in reporting “earnings before cyber incident” after all. 

And why are we so obsessed over this? Don’t forget that starting next week, new SEC rules for expanded disclosure of cybersecurity incidents go into effect. Companies will need to discuss their general cybersecurity risks and how they manage those risks in the annual report; and will need to disclose “material cybersecurity incidents” in 8-K filings within four days of deciding any such attack is indeed material.

Clothing retailer Lands’ End filed its latest earnings release on Tuesday, with what seemed like underwhelming results: revenue down 12.5 percent from the year-ago period ($324.5 million), operating income swinging to a loss of $101.3 million, largely driven by a big honking goodwill impairment of $106.7 million.

So why did Lands’ End ($LE) shares pop by nearly 10 percent when the company dropped such icky news? Perhaps because the company also reported an improvement in gross profit.

The company said so itself, in its earnings release: “Our deliberate efforts to generate more profitable sales resulted in increased gross profit dollars and gross margin expansion of approximately 700 basis points and drove Adjusted EBITDA above the high end of our guidance range.” 

You can see why that might be the case. Gross profit is total revenue minus cost of revenue, and can be construed as a company’s ability to ward off inflationary pressure. If you can raise prices more than the cost of revenue, you can pass along higher cost of revenue to consumers, and protect net income. (Sure, other operating costs might rise due to inflation too, but you can always address that by being a cheap-o and embracing layoffs.) 

For the record, gross profit at Lands’ End rose 2.8 percent from the year-earlier period: $148.4 million one year ago, to $152.6 million today. Gross profit margin was 47 percent.

Calcbench then wondered: how does Lands’ End gross margin compare to its competitors? So we fired up our Multi-Company database page to compare quarterly gross profit margin at four other firms as well: TJX Cos. ($TJX), Gap ($GPS), VF Corp. ($VFC), and Under Armour ($UA).  

Our standardized metrics field tracks gross profit as a matter of course. Then we selected the “Time Series Data” option to pull up quarterly gross margins as far back as the start of 2019. The result is Figure 1, below.

Lands’ End is the line in red, and two points immediately jump out from the page. First, Lands’ End did not suffer any dramatic plunge in gross profit during the pandemic, which is more than we can say for Gap and TJX. (Presumably that’s because those two firms rely on in-store sales more than the others?) 

Second, gross profit for Lands’ End began a sharp climb upward at the end of 2022 — much higher than the other four firms, although Gap does make a decent show of things in the last few quarters. If that steep ascend for Lands’ End is hard to discern, here’s how matters look if you start from the beginning of 2022. 

Like, now you see it: while other retailers battled back and forth with inflationary pressures for the last 18 months, Lands End has made an impressive march upward since the start of this year. 

We should also note that goodwill impairment of $106.7 million. Lands’ End attributes that to “the decline in the company’s share price,” and lord knows that’s true. The company went from a high of $42 per share in mid-2021 to $11 one year ago, to a lackluster $6.75 in the last six weeks or so. 

But as ugly as that impairment makes net income this quarter, long-term growth depends on factors like gross and operating profit margin. Right now, gross profit is moving in the right direction — and it’s moving in that direction faster than Lands’ End competitors. 

Everyone loves to talk about the potential for artificial intelligence these days. Calcbench decided to take that analysis one step further: how are things going with the microchip companies behind the budding AI revolution? 

This is on our minds because Nvidia Corp. ($NVID), dominant player in the AI microchip market right now, filed its latest quarterly report just before Thanksgiving. Revenue was a stupendous $18.1 billion, up from $13.5 billion the previous quarter and more than triple the $5.9 billion Nvidia reported one year ago.

Impressive, sure. But if you want to see where Nvidia really pulls away from its competitors, you need to look at operating margins. 

Figure 1, below, shows quarterly operating margins for Nvidia and competitors Advanced Micro Devices ($AM), Intel ($INTC), and Qualcomm ($QCOM) for the last two years. Nvidia is in yellow.

Astonishing, isn’t it? One year ago was when ChatGPT and its generative AI brethren took the world by storm — and that’s when demand for Nvidia chips took off. While revenue more than tripled, cost of revenue increased only 71.4 percent ($2.75 billion to $4.72 billion) and operating expenses 15.8 percent ($2.57 billion to $2.98 billion). See Figure 2, below.

With numbers like that, operating margin pretty much had no choice but to soar. Pre-tax income also ballooned, so Nvidia has barrels of money it can spend on dividends, product development, acquisitions, debt repayment (ponder this for a moment: Nvidia has $9.7 billion in total debt, so it could pay off all its debt from the operating income of this quarter alone), or anything else that comes to the executive suite’s mind.

We compiled this research using our Multi-Company Search page for Figure 1, and the Company-in-Detail page for Figure 2. With a few clicks to search for standardized metrics such as revenue and operating income, it took us 10 minutes to make the chart above. 

Good news for analysts everywhere just before the Thanksgiving holiday: Calcbench has released its Q3 2023 Wrap-Up, so you have something to read surreptitiously on your phone while the in-laws gripe about politics.

We release our wrap-ups at the end of every earnings season (you probably figured out that part already) to study broad trends in revenue, net income, capital spending, and other important metrics. This quarter’s report tallies up the data for more than 3,300 non-financial firms — not quite every filer that’s out there, but more than enough to give us a sense of this quarter’s corporate performance. 

Most notably, we saw an 11.8 percent increase in net income compared to the year-earlier period. That compares to more modest increases in capital expenditures (up 3.4 percent) and inventory (up 1.7 percent), and overall revenue actually edged downward by 1.1 percent. See Figure 1, below.

(To be clear, all firms included in this report filed earnings for Q3 in both 2023 and 2022, for the most apples-to-apples comparison.)

The Q3 Wrap-Up also examines three specific sectors: retail, software, and chemicals, to get a sense of how performance varied from one sector to another.

Sometimes that performance varied by a lot. The 230 companies in our retail group, for example, reported a year-over-year jump in net income of 148.4 percent, while capital expenditures dropped 11.2 percent. Various specific companies had equally impressive numbers. Walmart ($WMT) revenue rose 5 percent; Amazon.com ($AMZN) net income jumped from $2.9 billion to $9.9 billion.

Meanwhile, the software sector saw year-over-year revenue rise 9.5 percent, while net income rose 72.7 percent — led, not surprisingly, by tech giants such as Facebook ($META), Google ($GOOG), and Microsoft ($MSFT), which all reported multi-billion dollar increases in profit. See Figure 2, below.

The highlights in this report are a great place to start when analyzing Q3, but they certainly do not tell individual stories of specific companies. For example, Berkshire Hathaway ($BRKA) reported a year-over-year revenue of $16.3 billion (yay!) and a decrease in net income of $9.8 billion (yuck). To find out more about the specific companies you follow, you’ll need to do more digging and reading in the footnote disclosures. 

For example, did you know Berkshire reported investment losses of $24.1 billion in the quarter? We did, because our Interactive Disclosure tool lets you dig into the footnotes and bring those important kernels of insight to the surface in short order.