Below is a chart that shows a very small sample of metrics that Calcbench maintains. The bars represent Year over Year aggregate changes in Revenues, Capital Expenditures, Cost Of Revenue (aka Cost of Goods Sold), SG&A, Operating Expenses, Cash Dividends paid to shareholders and Cash.
Net Income Drop Sticking out at you like a sore thumb is the drastic drop in Net Income on a year over year basis (18.5%). The answer lies in one time items. Calcbench took the seven firms with the largest drops in Net Income on a year-over-year basis and looked deeper. What we found was very interesting and is summarized in the table below:
The drop of 41B USD is largely explained by these outlier firms. In contrast, the top 7 on the Net Income Gains side contributed 20B USD.
Capital Expenditures, may serve as an indicator of the confidence of a firm. When taken as an aggregate, the confidence level of industry becomes apparent. In Q4 2014 CAPEX grew by 10.9% over Q4 2013. But looking at firms by size is quite telling. Most firms are increasing significantly 1.
Average cash on the balance sheet is down by 0.5% YoY. The chart below is aggregated by Sector (based on 2 digit SIC Code). For this group of firms, we eliminated financials as they use cash in operations.
Expenses Overall, Operating Expenses grew 4.5% Year over Year and Costs of Revenues were up by 2.7% in the same period. Note that scale matters as small to mid-sized firms had higher than average expense increases.
Pranav Ghai is the co-founder and CEO of Calcbench and this report was created using data analyzed via Calcbench’s Premium Suite.