MW 20 stocks of companies that delivered a double dose of growth this earnings season

By Philip van Doorn

Companies in the S&P 500 achieving double-digit sales growth while improving profit margins include Palantir, Micron, Boeing and Alphabet

Alphabet, Boeing, Micron and Netflix are four of the companies passing a screen of the S&P 500 for the largest increases in quarterly sales per share with concurrent improvement in gross margins and operating margins.

Each earnings season, most companies will report earnings per share that exceed the consensus estimates among analysts working for brokerage and research firms. A typical "beat rate" is 80%, so it means approximately nothing. What might be more interesting for investors is to look at sales growth and profit margins.

One-time events can affect companies' bottom lines, but gross profit margins and operating margins will exclude some of those extraordinary items, such as goodwill write-downs or restructuring charges. So we have screened the S&P 500 SPX for companies showing the greatest increase in revenue per share this earnings season, while also expanding the two profit margins.

Earnings-season winners screen

Since 27% of companies in the S&P 500 have fiscal reporting seasons that don't match the calendar, it is fair to say that earnings season never really ends. Through Tuesday, 65% of companies in the S&P 500 had reported results for fiscal quarters ended Nov. 15 or later.

Here is how we screened those 323 companies for an early list of earnings-season winners:

-- Increased quarterly sales per share from the year-earlier quarter. We screened for changes in sales per share rather than raw revenue. A company's revenue will, of course, increase if it acquires a competitor. However, it might issue stock to help pay for the acquisition, thus diluting the holdings of investors who held the stock before the acquisition was made. The per-share figure illustrates how much of the revenue increase is "available" to investors who held the acquiring company's stock before the new shares were issued. And if the share count is reduced through stock repurchases, sales per share will increase more rapidly than revenue. All per-share figures are adjusted by FactSet for any stock splits or spinoffs.

-- Improved gross profit margins. A company's gross margin is its net sales less the cost of goods or services sold, divided by sales. Net sales are sales minus returns and discounts, such as coupons. The cost of goods or services sold includes the actual expenses when making the items or providing the services. Gross margin is a measurement of pricing power and core efficiency.

-- Improved operating margins. A company's operating margin incorporates more overhead and other expenses that aren't directly related to the production of goods and services. It can be summarized as earnings before interest and taxes, divided by sales.

Profit margins vary by industry. A manufacturer of heavy equipment will tend to have lower gross margins than a mature software company, for example. So comparisons may be most useful between companies with similar business models.

A combination of sales growth and improving gross and operating margins is a good sign for any company. It indicates the company isn't being forced to offer discounts to defend its market share.

Gross-margin and operating-margin figures aren't available for many companies in the financial sector, because banks and insurers have their own industry-based measures of profitability. And, for some companies, operating margins weren't available for the most recent reported quarters because the companies' earnings press releases didn't include enough information for FactSet to calculate the margins.

Here are the 20 companies passing the screen with the largest increases in sales per share while also improving both profit margins:

   Gross margin - year-earlier quarter    Increase in sales per share  Gross margin  Gross margin -year-earlier quarter  Operating margin  Operating margin - year-earlier quarter 
   Palantir Technologies Inc.                                   67.0%        84.65%                              78.91%            41.40%                                    2.18% 
   Micron Technology Inc.                                       54.5%        56.00%                              38.90%            61.16%                                   48.71% 
   Sandisk Corp.                                                49.9%        50.94%                              32.30%            36.79%                                   11.78% 
   Amphenol Corp. Class A                                       46.7%        38.22%                              34.29%            31.36%                                   25.70% 
   Boeing Co.                                                   40.4%         7.58%                             -10.37%            -0.96%                                  -21.73% 
   Regency Centers Corp.                                        35.3%        55.22%                              43.81%            69.87%                                   61.59% 
   Las Vegas Sands Corp.                                        34.4%        37.96%                              36.22%            34.48%                                   33.81% 
   Southwest Airlines Co.                                       32.1%        21.24%                              18.47%            11.18%                                   10.66% 
   DaVita Inc.                                                  29.3%        28.28%                              27.17%            20.39%                                   19.88% 
   Hasbro Inc.                                                  28.1%        66.70%                              56.25%            23.56%                                   12.31% 
   Lam Research Corp.                                           25.0%        49.60%                              47.37%            35.81%                                   32.68% 
   TE Connectivity PLC                                          23.4%        37.87%                              35.82%            27.07%                                   24.64% 
   PTC Inc.                                                     22.5%        81.07%                              78.19%            38.78%                                   26.45% 
   Tapestry Inc.                                                22.2%        72.98%                              72.14%            30.55%                                   23.85% 
   Uber Technologies Inc.                                       22.1%        33.03%                              32.44%            13.64%                                   11.89% 
   Cardinal Health Inc.                                         21.8%         3.52%                               3.39%             1.59%                                    1.37% 
   Netflix Inc.                                                 20.8%        46.28%                              43.41%            65.05%                                   63.37% 
   Fair Isaac Corp.                                             20.6%        82.96%                              80.15%            46.50%                                   41.61% 
   Corning Inc.                                                 20.1%        35.26%                              32.59%            24.89%                                   20.14% 
   Alphabet Inc. Class A                                        19.4%        59.85%                              57.89%            36.97%                                   36.45% 
                                                                                                                                                                   Source: FactSet 

Click on the ticker symbols for more about each company.

Read: Tomi Kilgore's detailed guide to the information available on the MarketWatch quote page

Alphabet $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ is the only one of the U.S. artificial-intelligence hyperscalers to make the list. This group of companies spending massively to build out their computing power to support the development of generative AI also includes Microsoft $(MSFT)$, Amazon.com (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META) and Oracle $(ORCL)$.

Alphabet's fourth-quarter revenue increased 18% from the year-earlier quarter, but its sales per share were up 19.4%. This is because the company's average diluted share count for the fourth quarter, used to calculate earnings per share, was down 1% from a year earlier. Alphabet spent $45.7 billion on stock buybacks during 2025.

Don't miss: Microsoft and Oracle may be bargain stocks, according to this analysis

-Philip van Doorn

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February 11, 2026 22:44 ET (03:44 GMT)

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