🗞 The 5 Best Charts of Earnings Season Week 1

Happy Sunday! 👋 

Here’s what’s on the docket for this week’s newsletter:

• 📊 The 5 Best Charts of Earnings Season week 1

• 🎮️ EA: The Biggest LBO Ever

Let’s dive in!

Featured Story

5 Best Charts: Earnings Season Week 1

Earnings season is officially upon us!

More than 500 companies reported earnings this week, which meant there was plenty of new data to analyze on Fiscal.ai!

Here are the 5 charts that stood out the most:

1. Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC)

Sales from Taiwan Semiconductor’s most advanced nodes (3nm and 5nm) now account for 60% of TSMC’s overall revenue.

2. American Express

American Express is flexing its pricing power.

Its average fee per card rose 13% compared to a year ago. People now pay $119 per year on average to be an American Express cardholder. That’s roughly double what they paid 5 years ago.

3. ASML

The average price of a single EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machine from ASML now costs €235 million.

*Custom Metrics Formula: Total EUV Net System Sales Revenue / Total EUV Net System Sales (Units)

4. Charles Schwab

Despite markets remaining near all-time highs, clients at Charles Schwab are holding the lowest percentage of cash — just 9% of total assets — that they have since the Great Financial Crisis.

5. Interactive Brokers

Interactive Brokers (IBKR) has been in business for more than 40 years, but it appears they waited until this decade to really hit their growth spurt.

IBKR crossed 4 million total accounts this quarter, which is up nearly 20x from their account base in 2012.

Partner Spotlight: App Economy Insights

🎮️ EA: The Biggest LBO Ever 

Electronic Arts is set to go private.

It’s a staggering $55 billion deal, smashing the record for the largest leveraged buyout in history.

Mega-LBOs are high-wire acts by definition. They’re built on mountains of debt, leaving no room for a single misstep and sporting a notoriously mixed track record of success.

But EA isn’t a typical target. It offers critical advantages private equity craves: iconic annual sports franchises, predictable recurring revenue from live services, and a scale few rivals can match.

Live Services are the center of gravity.

Think products like Ultimate Team–style modes, microtransactions, subscriptions. They made up 73% of the overall revenue in the past 12 months, up from 64% in FY19 (ending in March).

I created the graph below using the Custom Metrics screen on Fiscal.ai, our data platform partner. It allows you to visualize any ratio or specific segment or KPI over time. In this example, I used Live Services revenue in % of overall revenue.

Net bookings are flat since 2022 

Net bookings = The total dollar value of what players bought from EA in the period (full games, in-game add-ons/live services, subscriptions, and mobile) whether or not EA has recognized it as GAAP revenue yet.

• Plateauing: Net bookings set a high watermark of $7.5 billion in FY22 and have been flat since. Sports titles are mature at this stage of the console cycle. Apex Legends comps got tougher. Fewer ‘step-function’ launches in the past 3 years.

• Industry backdrop: The global games market has been nearly flat over this stretch, from $184 billion in 2022 to a projected $189 billion in 2025, with consoles leading modest growth while mobile slowed. So EA has been in line with the industry.

• LBO lens: stability is good for a leveraged buyout, but a return to growth will require new content catalysts.

Console is still the bedrock

• Console is the anchor: Across the last decade, console has carried the bulk of revenue and captured most live-ops spend. The PS4→PS5 / Xbox One→Series transition didn’t break the model. Attach rates to Ultimate Team–style modes deepened on console.

• PC is the steady No. 2: Smaller than console but meaningful, helped by Apex Legends, F1, and by frictionless digital delivery (EA Play/Steam).

• Mobile grew through acquisitions: EA has struggled with mobile and most of its growth there since 2021 came from the acquisition of Glu Mobile ($2.1 billion) and Playdemic ($1.4 billion).

• Physical → digital is basically done: The secular shift lifted mix, raised margin (no discs, no retail cuts), and increased the surface area for recurrent spend.

The shape of EA’s P&L 

• High gross margin: Digital delivery and live-ops content yield software-like gross margins. Platform fees and licensing are the big line items in cost of revenue.

• Marketing is reasonable: Annual sports cycles and evergreen live services lower the need for blockbuster launch spend every year. Marketing scales with tentpoles rather than spiking unpredictably.

• R&D is heavy by design: Ongoing engine work, live-ops tooling, annual sports updates, and large creative teams keep R&D as the biggest OpEx bucket. This is where cadence is funded.

• Very profitable business: EA has maintained an operating margin above 20% in four of the past five fiscal years.