Why the same company shows three different revenues in three places

Look up any large company's annual revenue in three places and you will often get three answers. They are rarely the result of anyone being wrong. They come from four distinct ambiguities — which line of the income statement, which twelve months, which currency, and whether anyone checked — and each one is worth being able to spot.

Which line of the income statement

Berkshire Hathaway's 2025 accounts are the clearest illustration. Total revenues for the year ended 31 December 2025 were $371,444 million. Revenue from contracts with customers — insurance premiums, freight on BNSF, energy, manufacturing, retail — was $247,244 million. The $124 billion between them is investment and derivative gains, which move with markets rather than with anything the operating businesses did. Warren Buffett's shareholder letters have argued for years against reading the headline total as a measure of the business.

Oil majors split the same way for a different reason. Chevron's FY2025 filing reports total revenues and other income of $189,031 million and sales and other operating revenues of $184,432 million; the gap is income from equity affiliates and other items. BP's group income statement leads with sales and other operating revenues of $189,335 million. Quote either company's "revenue" without saying which line you took, and you have chosen a number without telling the reader you chose.

Which twelve months

Fiscal years do not line up, and the mismatch is larger than people expect. Apple's 2025 financial year ended on 27 September 2025. Microsoft's ended on 30 June 2026. NVIDIA's 2026 financial year ended on 25 January 2026. Three companies, three "most recent annual figures", covering three substantially different periods — and for anything cyclical, that alone can account for a double-digit percentage difference between two honest comparisons.

The label makes it worse rather than better. NVIDIA's "FY2026" ended in January 2026, and so covers mostly calendar 2025. Microsoft's "FY2026" ended in June 2026 and covers mostly the first half of 2026. The same four characters describe periods that barely overlap.

Which currency, and on what day

Companies that do not report in dollars introduce a second moving part. LVMH reported revenue of EUR 80.8 billion for 2025. Samsung Electronics reported KRW 333.6 trillion. Converting either to dollars requires picking an exchange rate, and the answer changes with the rate rather than with the business.

At the rate on 8 September 2026 — EUR 1 to USD 1.1625 — LVMH's figure is about $93.9 billion. Move the euro five per cent and the dollar figure moves five per cent while nothing at LVMH has changed. Any dollar figure for a company that reports in another currency is really two numbers: the company's result, and a currency quote from some unstated day. A source that gives you only the product of the two has thrown away half the information.

And whether anyone checked

The fourth ambiguity is the least interesting and the most common. Until recently this site showed ExxonMobil at $323.91 billion of annual revenue. The figure matched neither revenue line ExxonMobil's own FY2025 Form 10-K tags: total revenues and other income were $332,238 million. It was not a definitional choice, it was simply wrong, and it had been sitting on an indexed page.

Others here were worse. Shell was shown at $380 billion against a reported total revenue of $266,886 million — 42 per cent high. BP at $220 billion against $189,335 million. Chevron at a round $200 billion. All of them were plausible-looking round numbers that nobody had traced to a document, which is the quiet failure mode of this whole genre: a figure that is nearly right is much harder to notice than one that is absurd.

How to check one yourself

For any company that files with the SEC, the fastest route is not the filing itself but the XBRL data behind it. The company-facts endpoint at data.sec.gov returns every tagged figure the company has filed, with the accession number of the filing it came from, which means you can see both the number and the document that states it without reading a 300-page PDF.

Two tags carry what people usually mean by revenue: us-gaap:Revenues for the total line, and us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax for sales to customers. Companies with one revenue line tag only the second; companies with several tag both. Foreign private issuers filing a 20-F use the IFRS taxonomy instead — Shell and BP appear under ifrs-full:Revenue.

Every stock counter on this site now cites the specific document and the figure as that document prints it, and an automated check refuses to build if a page's figure drifts more than one per cent from its citation. That is not a claim to be right; it is a claim that being wrong is now visible.