The bottom line of earnings season adds up to this: companies are running into big trouble with their top lines.
While companies generally tend to beat both earnings and revenue expectations, this year more have missed their first-quarter top-line estimates than beaten.
Out of the first 201 S&P 500 (^GSPC) Index companies to report first-quarter earnings, only 47 percent have beaten revenue estimates, according to FactSet. If this number holds, it will be the first time that more companies have missed than beaten earnings expectations since the first quarter of 2013.
Now, analysts on the whole expect to see S&P 500 revenue fall 3.5 percent year-over-year, whereas they had expected just a 2.6 percent drop when the first quarter ended.
Meanwhile, earnings have surpassed analyst expectations nicely, with 73 percent of companies beating earnings-per-share estimates, according to FactSet. That's equal to the five-year average percentage of beats.
The surging dollar (New York Board of Trade (Futures): =USD) and sliding crude oil (Intercontinental Exchange Europe: @LCO.1) have certainly played a role in leading to this divergence.
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En masse, analysts appear to have underestimated the impact of macro factors on revenue numbers. However, companies that hedged their exposure effectively may not see profits drop due to the predictable impacts of macro factors.
That is, if the rising dollar does to profits what companies expected it would to revenue, then they will see the disappointment register on the top line. However, they can deal with the effect of the drop in sales before it hits their bottom line.
For instance, United Technologies (UTX) reported that they saw 3 percent sales growth when currency is held stable, but that this growth was more than wiped out by 4 percent with of headwinds from the rising dollar.
Still, even though reported sales fell slightly compared to the year prior, United Technologies (UTX) managed to grow net income by 15 percent, with considerable help from the $589 million in cash received from the settlements of derivative contracts, an amount equal to 40 percent of the company's revenue. (By contrast, the company paid out $113 million to settle derivatives contracts in the year-ago quarter.)
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These gains were "primarily related to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar versus the euro (:EUR1M=) and Canadian dollar (Exchange:CAD1MD=)," the company explained in a note to its quarterly earnings filing.