So says the Calcbench Earnings Tracker, which we use during earnings season to collect financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We first turned on the tracker for Q3 2024 earnings last week; as of this week we now have data on more than 2,300 firms crunched and ready for your analysis.

Figure 1, below, shows the headline data.

That 7.3 percent decline in net income might seem alarming, but the drop is thanks to two huge, one-time items from Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) and Intel ($INTC):

• J&J reported a massive gain one year ago when it sold off its stake in Kenvue Corp. ($KVUE) for $21.7 billion. That gain didn’t recur in Q3 2024, so even though J&J reported $2.7 billion in net income this quarter, that’s down roughly 90 percent from the $26.03 billion the company reported one year ago. 

• Intel reported a $5.6 billion restructuring charge for Q3 2024, along with various other losses. So Intel’s bottom line for this quarter is a stunning $16.64 billion net loss, compared to $297 million in net income one year ago.

If you drop Intel and J&J from our sample, then the remaining 2,300 firms saw net income increase by 3.5 percent compared to one year ago. See Figure 2, below.

Just goes to show that you should always dig deeper into the data for better insight. You’ll find lots if you look.

Meanwhile, we can also see that most major financial metrics moved into positive territory this week, including capex, opex, inventory, assets, liabilities, and cost of revenue. One week ago most of those categories were still lower than the year-earlier period. See Figure 3, below.

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 us@calcbench.com.