Fear not, Calcbench has tools to help. 

We wanted to offer one quick example in the form of Illumina Inc. ($ILMN), a San Diego-based maker of high-end equipment for genomics analysis. The Chinese government included Illumina today on a roster of 20 U.S. firms now “blacklisted” in China, meaning those firms cannot import any goods or services at all into the Chinese market.

What does that mean for Illumina? Using our Disclosures & Footnotes Query tool, we pulled up the company’s revenue footnote from its 2024 Form 10-K, filed on Feb. 12. Once there, you can see that Illumina reported $308 million in “Greater China revenue” for 2024. See Figure 1, below.

As you can see, that $308 million was roughly 7 percent of Illumina’s $4.37 billion in total revenue for the year. Clearly some portion of that is now in dire jeopardy, since Beijing is no longer allowing any Illumina imports into the country — but we don’t know precisely how much is at risk, because Illumina defines “Greater China” as mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

This is one challenge with geographic segment analysis: a company is free to define its geographic segments as it sees fit, so different companies define those regions in different ways. Some will report a single China segment; others will report a Greater China like Illumina does. Still more might report an “Asia-Pacific” segment that could include Japan, Korea, or any number of other Asia nations; and some companies might not report any geographic segments at all. 

That said, you can also use Calcbench to dig up more historical data and see that Illumina has been relying less on Greater China revenue for the last few years anyway. We dug up prior years’ segment disclosures and pulled together Figure 2, below, in about 90 seconds.

Two other quick points analysts might want to keep in mind. First, when a company suffers a direct hit in the trade wars — does that qualify as a material event worthy of an 8-K filing? We at Calcbench don’t know (we’re data providers, not securities lawyers) but Illumina hasn’t filed one so far today. Regardless, Calcbench users can always configure your email alerts to be notified whenever a company you follow does file an 8-K. 

Second, we can’t help but wonder: if tariffs and trade wars become a permanent fixture on the economic scene, might that prod some businesses to reconfigure their geographic market disclosures to offer more transparency into this issue? For example, will we see more companies disclose a dedicated “China” segment instead of Asia-Pacific, or reclassify a “North America” segment into Canada, the United States, and Mexico? 

That remains to be seen — but whatever happens, Calcbench will be tracking companies’ disclosures to help you understand it.

Our latest analysis captures data from more than 2,100 non-financial firms that had filed Q4 earnings releases by 3 p.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 28. Net income grew nearly 18 percent from the year-ago period, with revenue, capex spending, and Sales, General & Administrative costs all also a few points higher than they were for Q4 2023.

Figure 1, below, gives our final numbers for the quarter.

Some people might ask, “What about Nvidia? Didn’t they just report gobs and gobs of net income, and is that skewing net income growth for the whole?” That’s a fair question; NVidia ($NVDA) did report $9.8 billion in net income earlier this week, which is indeed an enormous sum. 

Still, the answer is no, Nvidia’s performance did not skew results to any unusual degree. Even if you exclude the AI chipmaker from our analysis, net income still stood at 15.9 percent higher than Q4 2023. 

That said, the Nvidia question does point to another, related issue: that impressive net income number is heavily tilted toward the largest firms in our sample group.

Specifically, the 50 firms with the biggest net income numbers account for 55 percent of all net income ($446.18 billion’s worth) in our sample of 2,140 non-financial firms. The remaining 45 percent is split among more than 2,000 smaller firms. 

To a certain extent, that’s to be expected; bigger firms generate more revenue and more net income. But the pattern is indeed quite lop-sided, and in a spot-check we noticed that many of those smaller firms actually reported net losses in Q4. It makes you wonder about the health of Corporate America overall. We’ll dig into the data and explore that issue more deeply in further posts next week. 

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 info@calcbench.com.

Meanwhile, that’s all for Q4. The Earnings Tracker will now take a breather for six weeks, until mid-April rolls around and we can start looking at Q1 2025!

Exhibit A this week: non-performing assets as a percentage of total assets — which, while small in absolute dollar numbers, are rising rather swiftly in relative terms. 

Figure 1, below, tells the tale. We pulled disclosures from the Q4 2024 earnings releases of 167 banks, and found that the percentage of non-performing assets was hovering at a three-year high at the end of last year.

The good news is that non-performing assets are still only 0.5 percent of total assets, a tiny fraction. Then again, that number is up from a low of 0.2 percent at the end of 2022. This means that the relative percentage has more than doubled in two years, which is a steep increase.

Of course, Figure 1 only depicts average numbers derived from a group of 167 banks. The numbers for individual banks might paint very different pictures. 

For example, Wells Fargo ($WFC) reported $7.94 billion of non-performing assets at the end of 2024, which was 0.87 percent of all Wells Fargo loans. Meanwhile, Triumph Financial ($TFIN) reported a non-performing assets ratio of 2.49 percent, down from 2.62 percent in the prior quarter but up from 1.65 percent from the year-earlier period.

Also remember that banks do report plenty of detail about their loan portfolio in the footnotes. For example, Bank of America breaks down its loans by consumer real estate, commercial real estate (which is then broken down into yet more categories), credit card loans, and other loan types. Then BofA reports loans in arrears by 30, 60, and 90 or more days past due, for each category. See Figure 2, below.

You have to squint to see the numbers as reported in the above footnote (it’s titled “Outstanding Loans and Leases and Allowance for Credit Losses,” and most banks will title their footnote something like that), but you can also pull out the numbers using our Export Data Tables feature or searching by XBRL tag. As always, Calcbench offers several ways for you to find and study the data you want.

One number that caught our eye was Walmart’s quarterly revenue, which clocked in at $173.4 billion. That’s impressive, but it’s also a shade lower than quarterly revenue at rival retail giant Amazon.com ($AMZN), which reported $187.8 billion for its most recent quarter. 

But wait! Is it really fair to compare Walmart and Amazon like that? After all, Amazon has a significant operating segment that has nothing to do with consumer commerce: Amazon Web Services, an IT hosting platform that Amazon sells as a service to other companies. Walmart doesn’t have a comparable line of business. 

So if we want to compare the brick-and-mortar world of Walmart against the e-commerce world of Amazon, how can we do that? 

Actually, in Calcbench it’s not that hard. Our databases track segment-level disclosures that companies make — and since Amazon reports AWS as its own operating segment, you can (a) identify AWS revenue and operating expenses; (b) subtract those numbers from Amazon’s total revenue and opex; and (c) arrive at a number that depicts Amazon’s e-commerce operations only, which you can then compare to Walmart.

For example, Figure 1, below, compares quarterly revenue between Walmart and Amazon’s global e-commerce revenue (basically, everything except the AWS segment) for the last three years. 

Now we can see that Amazon’s e-commerce performance is closing in on Walmart’s revenue numbers — but it hasn’t surpassed the Arkansas giant yet. 

Next question: what about operating income? After all, Walmart and Amazon might seem roughly equal in revenue dollars, but the two companies have radically different operations. 

Well, you can answer that question in Calcbench too. Amazon reports three operating segments: North America, International, and AWS. For each of those segments, the company also discloses revenue and operating income.

So by using our Export Data Tables feature and doing a bit of math, we were able to add up the revenue and operating income for Amazon’s e-commerce operations (that is, the North America and International segments), and then calculate operating margin for those e-commerce operations. 

Meanwhile, Walmart’s operating segments are all about retail operations anyway, so calculating its operating margins is a breeze: just track the company’s total revenue and total operating income.

That’s how we arrived at Figure 2, below.

Hmmm. That chart allows you to ask some really interesting questions. For example, why did Amazon run a negative operating margin in 2022? That was a year of inflation and massive hiring in the tech sector — so to what extent did those forces pressure operating expenses in the e-commerce division? How has Amazon returned to growing operating margins since then? 

Or consider Walmart, largest business on the planet: its operating margins have been positive (good), but they’ve also held remarkably steady over the last three years. That insight allows financial analysts to ponder more precise questions about how Walmart will navigate 2025 (where, remember, the company just posted lower earnings guidance) and fend off rivals such as Amazon — or all the other brick-and-mortar retailers out there, many of which haven’t even filed their latest quarterly reports yet. 

Our point here is simply that headline numbers in an earnings release or on the primary financial statements rarely tell the whole picture — but the data is there, tucked away in the footnotes. Yes, you need to pull that data out of the footnotes so that you can see what it tells you; but with the right technology platform, no, it’s not that hard to do.

For those who haven’t paid attention to MicroStrategy's journey until now (oh, how we envy you), once upon a time the company had been a developer of business analytics software. In 2020, however, CEO Michael Saylor boldly announced that from then forward, MicroStrategy’s main line of business would be buying and holding bitcoin. That August, the company dropped $248.9 million to buy 21,454 bitcoin.

MicroStrategy has kept on that path ever since, issuing bonds and then using the cash to buy ever more bitcoin. Those holdings have also increased in value on a per BTC basis, including an astonishing price run that began immediately after the 2024 election and continues to this day.

The result is Figure 1, below, which charts out MicroStrategy’s total assets by bitcoin holdings and all other assets. 

Yowza, that’s a lot of value. For comparison purposes, MicroStrategy’s total bitcoin holdings were worth $6.85 billion at the end of September 2024 — and then soared another $17.06 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, to end the year with a total value of $23.91 billion.

Tucked within the MicroStrategy 10-K you can see where all that increase in value came from. The company includes a “Digital Assets” footnote which discloses the number of bitcoins held at the end of each period and their assessed value. See Figure 2, below.

As you can see, MicroStrategy does sometimes sell bitcoin, but only rarely. That made us wonder: how do they pay the bills while buying all those bitcoin? So we also looked at the company’s Segments footnote to see whether that rump business of selling software still turns enough profit to keep the lights on.

Answer: yes, MicroStrategy’s operating business still does turn a respectable profit. The company includes a somewhat off-beat income report in the Segment footnote, where you can see the operating unit’s performance pulled out from the bitcoin holdings. See Figure 3, below.

MicroStrategy had $463.4 million in operating revenue in 2024, which ultimately had net income of $175 million. Those numbers, however, are overshadowed by the digital assets division, which includes a $1.79 billion impairment charge; when you add both divisions together for one consolidated net income number, the profit from the operating division gets lost in the gloom.

An important point here is that if you only look at the primary income statement, you won’t see that net income from the operating side. You’ll see the $463.4 million revenue number at the top, and the $1.16 billion net loss at the bottom, but you’d need to do your own arithmetic to back out the $1.79 billion impairment charge and understand that the operating side did quite decently in 2024. 

Or you could just use Calcbench and dig into the footnotes with our Disclosures & Footnotes tool, because we always have your back — and the data you need.

This week’s analysis captures data from more than 1,000 non-financial firms that had filed Q4 earnings releases by 10 a.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 14. Net income continues to show double-digit growth from the year-ago period, but not quite as high as our numbers from last week. Total capex spending also fell, while cost of revenue and Sales, General & Administrative costs are now both higher than they were for Q4 2023.

Figure 1, below, tells the tale.

This is the first week we’ve seen cost of revenue and SG&A expenses now higher than they were in the year-ago period. Then again, our first two weeks of Q4 earnings analysis only tracked a relatively small number of large firms; this is the first week we’ve started to get data from a significant number of smaller firms. 

So will this week’s shift to higher costs endure as even more filers submit data in the next few weeks? We shall see. 

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.

We’ll continue to update our earnings tracker at the end of every week for the next few weeks, as quarterly reports flood into the database. 

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 info@calcbench.com.

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 the result of increasing net income at both companies by several hundred million dollars. Now we’re seeing the opposite effect.

OK, but why is Amazon trimming the estimated life of its servers? Consider this excerpt from the company’s 10-K:

“These … changes above are due to an increased pace of technology development, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

That is, the fast-evolving demands of AI are forcing Amazon to de-commission old servers that can’t keep up with the huge computing power required for AI. Fascinating, because that’s just about the opposite of what everyone expected several years ago when they were extending server life. Then came generative AI in 2022, and the world changed. 

Our point: even seemingly small changes in accounting policy can lead to big changes in corporate earnings. The data to sniff out such changes is there; you just need to know what to look for. 

Calcbench has the data. Usvyatsky’s analysis is a great example of how you could put that data to work, to understand why a company might be changing up its accounting policies and what the larger implications might be for peer companies you follow.

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.

At close of business on Friday, Feb. 7, we had Q4 filings for more than 700 non-financial firms. Revenue was up 3.11 percent, but net income popped an impressive 17.6 percent compared to the end of 2023. See Figure 1, below.

One nice data point is the cost of revenue, which is down 3.2 percent from the year-ago period. That tracks with our first Q4 earnings update last week, which reported a 3.94 percent decline — but that first week tracked only about 120 large firms, and wasn’t necessarily reflective of trends for all filers. Now we have 700+ firms from a wide range of industries, and are getting closer to trends reflective of all filers. Cost of revenue is still going down. For anyone still scarred by the inflation spike of two years ago, you can continue to breathe easier. 

Also note that Sales, General & Administrative expenses are down 1.8 percent. That could be reflective of lower payroll costs, or lower costs for items such as shipping, office supplies, utilities, or other overhead. Whatever the specifics, SG&A costs are down. CFOs won’t complain about that. 

Calcbench will continue to update our earnings tracker at the end of every week for the next few weeks, as quarterly reports flood into the database. 

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 info@calcbench.com.

Specifically, the NYT reports two revenue streams, subscription and advertising, for two separate customer categories: online and print customers. That lets us ask some interesting questions:

• How much is online revenue growing as a portion of total revenue? 

• Is online revenue growing fast enough to replace declining print revenue? 

• Is online revenue growing fast enough to keep revenue growing overall? 

Using our Export Data Tables feature, we were able to answer those questions within a few minutes. We tracked subscription and advertising revenue for print customers, the same for online customers, added everything up — and that let us see how print and online revenue compared as portions of the total revenue mix.

Figure 1, below, shows that online revenue is surging along quite nicely.

We should note that print and online revenue added together don’t equal total revenue precisely, because the Times does have several smaller lines of revenue not included here. Nonetheless, the Times is now clearly a digital publication with a legacy business delivering print newspapers to people’s doorsteps. 

Calcbench can also dig up historical data for revenue segments like this, often going years back. It’s not always perfect because companies do sometimes change their reporting segments or add new segments, but many times you can still get great historical data.

For example, Figure 2, below, shows digital subscription revenue (but not digital advertising revenue) as a percentage of total revenue, going back to the start of 2020. 

Just another example of the insights you can get into corporate performance, if you dig into the right data!

Turns out, more than a few companies disclose inventory as a non-current asset. The tricky part is that in many of those cases, the non-current inventory is added to “other assets.” You, the financial analyst on the outside, need to dig into the footnotes if you want to find that information. 

Typically that would be a painstaking exercise — but fear not! XBRL is coming to the rescue with a dedicated XBRL tag, InventoryNoncurrent. That allows you to use Calcbench to find the item simply and quickly.

So what is non-current inventory, anyway?

One example of non-current inventory comes from Pfizer (PFE). The pharma giant reported $4.57 billion in non-current inventory at the end of 2023, compared to $10.19 billion of current inventory. The information was included in the Other Financial Information note, and included the following table:

The small print shows that this amount was included in Other noncurrent assets. 

Another example is another pharma giant, Gilead Sciences (GILD). It reported $1.58 billion in non-current inventory at the end of 2023, compared to $1.79 billion of current inventory. This information was also included in the Other Financial Information note, and included the following table:

Again, you need to squint; but the table shows total inventory of $3.37 billion distributed between current and non-current inventory. Especially interesting is the note on the bottom stating that the non-current inventory “consist primarily of raw material.” 

Merck & Co. (MRK), which reported $3.35 billion of non-current inventory in Other Assets, stated that these amounts “are comprised almost entirely of raw materials and work in process inventories.” No additional information was provided by Merck (or any other of the above companies) about the nature of these materials or inventories. 

Is non-current inventory exclusive to pharma?  

Not entirely. It’s a common line-item in the pharma industry, sure; but non-current inventory does sometimes streak across the balance sheets of other sectors, too. 

For example, Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) reported $1.34 billion in non-current inventory at the end of 2023 was reported on the balance sheet, tucked away in the non-current assets section and labeled as “Long-term mill and leach stockpiles.”

The better question to ask, then, is what sorts of businesses would have inventory that qualifies as non-current? U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles defines inventory as “goods that a company holds for sale or use.” Non-current inventory would be goods that the company is holding for sale or use sometime in the long term — like, not within the current fiscal year. Raw materials, leaching stockpiles (whatever those are), and related goods would all fit the bill. Certain industries lend themselves to that more than others. 

Interested in learning more about inventory, non-current inventory, or other interesting data? Reach out to us at us@calcbench.com. Tell us what’s on your mind and how we can help.

As you may know, we track 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.

Today is our first look at fourth-quarter numbers. At close of business on Friday, Jan. 31, we had Q4 filings for roughly 360 non-financial firms. Revenue was up a bit from the year-ago quarter, net income was up more, capex even more than that. See Figure 1, below.

Interesting to see that the cost of revenue declined 3.94 percent, because we’re always looking for signs of inflation and that’s where said signs would appear. Then again, we only have a relative handful of firms reporting data so far; three weeks from now we’ll have data from well more than 1,000 firms and that could tell a much different picture. All we can say for now is, we’ll see. 

All that said, the filers in our Earnings Tracker so far are the biggest of the big: Altria, Albertsons, 3M, all the major airlines, all the major tech companies, Dow, ExxonMobil, Lockheed, Royal Caribbean, and all the biggest from every other industry. So even now, this first glimpse into Q4 earnings is useful.

Calcbench will continue to update our earnings tracker at the end of every week for the next few weeks, as quarterly reports flood into the database. 

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 info@calcbench.com.

The headline net income number from GM’s filing was a net loss of $2.96 billion for the fourth quarter, a huge swing from $2.1 billion in net income from the year-ago period. That said, GM then proceeded to add back $5.2 billion in adjustments, which led to non-GAAP adjusted net income of $2.51 billion for the quarter. 

What were those adjustments? Using the Export Data Tables feature that we’ve discussed previously, Calcbench pulled each one from GM’s earnings release and listed them all in table format. See Figure 1, below.

As you can see, the single largest adjustment was a $4.01 billion restructuring charge GM declared to extricate itself from joint-venture business in China. The company also declared a $500 million restructuring charge stemming from its decision (announced last month) to get out of the robotaxi business; and a $643 million charge related to previously announced buyouts of Buick dealerships.

It’s also interesting to note that the $5.2 billion worth of adjustments in Q4 accounted for the lion’s share of all non-GAAP adjustments GM made for the entire 2024 year. 

Adjusted earnings for the entire year were $14.94 billion, buoyed by $6.49 billion of adjustments. If you do the math, 80 percent of those adjustments happened in Q4. 

What we don’t yet know is the exact breakdown of that $2.96 billion loss reported in the top line of the earnings release. GM did report quarterly revenue of $47.7 billion, an 11 percent increase from the year-ago period; but details on cost of revenue and other operating expenses will need to wait until the company files its complete Form 10-K, which could be another few weeks.

Perhaps the most important non-GAAP earnings disclosure from airlines is total revenue per available seat mile, known as TRASM — but we’ve written about TRASM plenty of times before, so today we’re looking at another metric: average fuel cost per gallon.

This is a non-GAAP disclosure that all major airlines report. We like it because fuel is one of the single largest expenses an airline has, and average cost per gallon gives you a normalized sense of that cost pressure over time. You can find it via the Disclosures & Footnotes page; just pull up the airline’s earnings release and search for “fuel” or “gallon” and you’ll find it momentarily.

Figure 1, below, charts average fuel costs per gallon for six major U.S. airlines from 2021 through 2024 (although please note that Southwest ($LUV) and JetBlue ($JBLU) haven’t yet filed their Q4 numbers). 

As you can see, all the airlines endured painful price hikes in 2022. Presumably that was driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and overall inflation, both of which sent oil prices soaring that year. 

Average prices have since taken a bumpy downward path since then, but individual airlines often had average costs that vary considerably. For example, Alaska Air ($ALK) paid considerably more for fuel at the end of 2023, while Delta Air Lines ($DAL) has managed to keep its average fuel costs lower than all its rivals for pretty much all of the last three years. 

Airlines make other fuel-related disclosures, too. For example, they typically offer forward-looking guidance on estimated fuel costs, which you could then cross-check a few quarters later to see how well an airline you follow did or didn’t meet its expectations. They also report total fuel consumed and total money spent on fuel.

That said, remember that fuel consumed and total fuel cost can’t really give you an apples-to-apples comparison among airlines, since those numbers will vary wildly depending on an airline’s size, type of aircraft used, and routes flown. (Hence we like average fuel cost per gallon, which is more about an airline’s ability to plan for and hedge future costs.)

And of course, operating metrics about fuel look at an airline’s costs. Calcbench also tracks several metrics more related to an airline’s revenue, such as— 

• 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

• Percentage of revenue coming from passengers

Want to conduct your own easy analytical adventure in the airline industry? 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. 

After that, the sky’s the limit!

This time we turned our eyes to Prologis ($PLD), which owns and operates logistics real estate around the world— think data centers, distribution hubs, and the like. Prologis reports as a real estate investment fund, a sector that has a unique set of metrics such as FFO (funds from operations), AFFO (adjusted funds from operations), occupancy rates, and more. 

Prologis filed its Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings release this morning. We started reading, and found this table of operating performance metrics on the first page:

Average occupancy of 95.6 percent certainly seems high at first glance, but how has that metric performed over time? Using the Export Data Tables feature from our Recent Filings page (a shortcut we explained on these blog pages last week) we pulled average occupancy rates for each of Prologis’ last 12 quarters. The result is Figure 1, below.

Hmmm. Overall occupancy rates are still quite high in absolute terms, but in historical terms that number is clearly trending downward. 

Calcbench can’t interpret any meaning from those results. We just have easy access to earnings release data, including historical data and all the good stuff tucked away in the footnotes. If you have a project you’re working up and need some help, drop us a line any time at us@calcbench.com. 

Obvious question for financial analysts: which firms make these drugs, and how important are those products to the company’s total revenue? 

Don’t worry — Calcbench figured it out for you!

Pharmaceutical firms are required to report annual sales of their blockbuster drugs as individual operating segments of the whole business. So we just took the list of drugs newly added to the Medicare Negotiation program, identified who sells them, and then looked up each drug’s individual revenue. The result is Table 1, below.

As you can see, some of the drugs are major revenue sources for their respective manufacture. Xifaxan, used to treat diarrhea, accounted for 20 percent of Bausch Cos.’ ($BHC) total sales in 2023; that’s a lot of exposure. 

Even more precarious is the position of Novo Nordisk ($NVO), which has three weight loss drugs (Ozempic, Weygovy, and Reybelsus) on the list, and altogether they accounted for a whopping 36 percent of Novo’s revenue in 2023.

What will the numbers look like for 2024? Ask us in a few weeks as the pharma firms start filing their annual reports. We’ll stay on it. 

To be clear, nobody yet knows what price the incoming Trump Administration will negotiate with the pharma companies on our list, or whether the Trump Administration will even bother negotiating at all. President-elect Trump has railed about the high price of drugs before, but the pharmaceutical industry has challenged the legality of the Medicare Negotiation Program in court and it’s not clear that the Trump Administration will bother to defend it.

Politics isn’t our thing here so we’ll have those questions alone. Still, right now, the addition of new drugs to the negotions list poses a significant new risk to Big Pharma firms. Calcbench can help you quickly identify and assess the size of that risk, so you can respond accordingly.

Figure 1, below, shows UnitedHealth’s total revenue for the last eight quarters. As one can see, revenue in 2024 was up appreciably from 2023. 

Figure 2 shows that quarterly revenue broken down by business unit. To little surprise, insurance premiums accounted for the solid majority of all company revenue. 

That’s how the money is coming in. Figure 3, below, shows how it’s going out: UnitedHealth operating expenses for the last eight quarters. Again to little surprise, most of UnitedHealth’s costs go toward paying medical claims. 

Lastly, we wanted to understand medical costs as a portion of revenue. Figure 4 shows that for the last eight quarters that number has stayed within a narrow band, accounting for roughly two-thirds of all revenue every quarter for the last two years. 

The Calcbench research team pulled together all these charts in less than 10 minutes, using the Export Data Tables feature we discussed in a post earlier this week. That feature is available to all Calcbench users, to dig up precise, comprehensive, segment-level data with just a few keystrokes.

Start with our Recent Filings page, which tracks and indexes corporate filings typically within a few minutes of those filings arriving at the Securities and Exchange Commission. For many companies (and almost all large ones), you’ll see an option on the far right side of your screen that says Export Data Tables. See Figure 1, below.

If you click on that Export Data Tables option, Calcbench will then open a new tab displaying all the table data from the company you’ve chosen in spreadsheet format. We randomly selected Calumet ($CLMT), a solvents manufacturer that filed preliminary earnings results on Jan. 14, to see what would come up. The result is Figure 2, below.

OK, a quick table to reconcile Calumet’s estimated net loss for Q4 to the company’s Adjusted EBITDA. Calumet reported a potential range for Q4 net loss, and we won’t know the precise number until it files a full earnings release and quarterly report in a few weeks — but you can already see some internal adjustment items and what they’re likely to be.

There’s more, too. Look at that row of buttons above the spreadsheet: the second one from the left says “Filings.” If you click on that button, you’ll get a new display that lets you see all the recent filings right there next to your spreadsheet. See Figure 3, below.

Now you can choose from any of the filers on that new pane on the right; when you hit “Export Data Tables” again, that information will automatically populate into the spreadsheet display on the left.

Even better, notice the text field above that list of recent filers. You can type in the name of any company, and get a display of all filings for that company. We typed in JPMorgan Chase ($JPM), and got the results shown in Figure 4, below.

Astute observers will notice the spreadsheet display is now different. That’s because once the list of JPMorgan filings appeared, we clicked on Export Data Tables for the Form 8-K earnings filing listed near the top. As soon as we did, Calcbench displayed all important financial metrics at the top and then listed 10 tables’ worth of data further down the spreadsheet. It’s all there, waiting to be exported to your own desktop in a tidy Excel spreadsheet. 

(Especially astute observers will even notice that the Calumet data is still there on the spreadsheet too, in a secondary tab pushed to the back.)

You can use these capabilities to hop from one filing to another, extracting footnote-level disclosures and piling them into nifty spreadsheet tables with just a few clicks; Calcbench does all the heavy extraction and processing for you. Everything is neatly labeled, lined up, and ready to go.

All you need is a Calcbench subscription, a keen sense of which companies you want to study, and strong fingers to start typing as soon as the earnings data starts to arrive. We’ll do the rest!