Retail week arrives with the consumer data already pointing the other way. July retail sales fell 0.6% in Friday’s release, the sharpest monthly drop since May 2025 against expectations of a small rise, and the University of Michigan’s preliminary August sentiment reading fell to 51 from July’s 55.2, against a forecast nearer 55. Into that, the big-box chains report in three days – Home Depot Tuesday; Target, Lowe’s and TJX Wednesday; Walmart Thursday morning, last and by some distance the largest. Thursday carries the week’s two biggest prints, because Alibaba reports the June quarter before the same US open, with external cloud growth the one number management has effectively pre-committed to accelerating. Tuesday belongs to the resource complex – BHP’s full-year result, the first presented under a new chief executive, from a stock up about 47% over twelve months – and Wednesday to Analog Devices, the cleanest available gauge of whether the industrial semiconductor cycle has genuinely turned. Xiaomi, Viking and Sinopec fill in the rest. Twenty-two names make our calendar; Deere, Ping An, AIA, NetEase, Baidu, Keysight and Estée Lauder headline the others.
🇺🇸 Walmart
$WMT reports fiscal second-quarter results Thursday before the US open – the largest print of the week and the cleanest read on the American consumer, arriving after Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s and TJX have already reported into it. The shares closed Friday at $115.27, down 0.39%, against a 52-week range of $95.42 to $135.16 and a record close set in May; on trailing earnings the stock still trades just over 40 times. The April quarter was strong on the top line and less so below it: revenue rose 7.3%, Walmart US comparable sales grew 4.1%, global e-commerce rose 26% with US store-fulfilled delivery up 45%, and global advertising rose 37%, with Walmart US advertising up 36% – but operating income grew only 5.0%, to $7.49bn, which the company said was held back by roughly 250 basis points from higher fuel costs in distribution and fulfilment.
Guidance for this quarter is 4–5% constant-currency net sales growth, 7–10% constant-currency adjusted operating income growth and $0.72–0.74 of adjusted earnings, against a year-ago base of $175.8bn of net sales, $7.9bn of adjusted operating income and $0.68 of adjusted earnings. Consensus sits at the top of that earnings range, near $0.74. Walmart also told investors in May that if the elevated cost environment persisted it expected somewhat higher retail price inflation in the second quarter and the second half, and that its guidance assumed no benefit from IEEPA tariff refunds – for which the maximum it might be eligible to receive as importer of record is less than half of 1% of US annual sales.
Our readThe gap between the sales guide and the profit guide is the swing factor – at the midpoints the company is asking for about 8.5% adjusted operating income growth on about 4.5% sales growth, and last quarter it delivered 5% on 7.3%. That four-point spread implies a return to positive operating leverage, with merchandise mix, e-commerce economics, advertising, membership income and cost discipline all needing to contribute. Watch Walmart US comps against the 4.1% base and the split between grocery and general merchandise inside it, since the two carry very different margins; e-commerce and advertising, which grew 26% and 37% last quarter and are central to the margin case without being the whole of it; and the full-year guide, because at least one consensus compilation for fiscal 2027 already sits above the top of the company’s own $2.75–2.85 range, which means a raise is partly assumed rather than hoped for. The read-across runs both ways: Walmart reports last among the big-box names, so it either confirms what they have said about the low-income consumer or contradicts it – and after Friday’s data, a reassuring guide would carry more weight than a reassuring quarter.
🇨🇳 Alibaba Group
Alibaba reports June-quarter results Thursday before the US open – China’s most-watched print, and now as much an AI-capex story as an e-commerce one. The ADRs closed Friday at $123.74, roughly a third above the June low near $92 and still about 35% below a 52-week high of $192.67; before an 11% single session on 8 July they had been down about 33% for the year. That session, the biggest one-day move in the Hong Kong line since September, followed reports from an analyst briefing that June-quarter instant-commerce losses had narrowed while group profitability held – a characterisation that has not yet been tested against a filing.
The March quarter is the base it is being measured from. Revenue rose 3% to RMB 243.4bn, short of a consensus near RMB 247bn. Cloud Intelligence Group revenue rose 38% to RMB 41.6bn with external-customer growth accelerating to 40%, AI-related products at about 30% of external cloud revenue and triple-digit growth in AI product revenue for an eleventh consecutive quarter. The cost of that showed up everywhere else: China e-commerce adjusted EBITA fell 40% to RMB 24.0bn on quick-commerce investment, group adjusted EBITA fell 84% to RMB 5.1bn, and free cash flow swung to an outflow of RMB 17.3bn from an inflow of RMB 3.7bn, which the company attributed to quick commerce, user acquisition for the Qwen app and cloud infrastructure. Capital expenditure was RMB 26.9bn in the quarter and RMB 126.1bn for the fiscal year, and chief executive Eddie Wu said the group was likely to overshoot its RMB 380bn three-year AI and cloud commitment. Consensus for this quarter sits near RMB 268bn of revenue.
Our readExternal cloud growth is the swing factor, because management has effectively pre-committed to it accelerating past the 40% printed in March, and the re-rating since July rests on that plus the claim that instant-commerce losses are shrinking. Watch China e-commerce adjusted EBITA against the RMB 24.0bn base, which is where the quick-commerce subsidy burn actually lands; capital expenditure against the RMB 26.9bn quarterly run-rate, given management has already signalled it will exceed the RMB 380bn plan; and free cash flow after last quarter’s RMB 17.3bn outflow, since that is the line where an AI build stops being a narrative. Alibaba is now the read-through for the whole China internet complex, with Baidu, NetEase and Ping An all reporting the same week – and the risk in a strong cloud number is that it arrives with a capex figure large enough to change what the rest of the group is worth.
🇦🇺 BHP Group
BHP publishes full-year results for the twelve months to 30 June Tuesday, before the Australian open – the largest listed miner, and the first result presented by Brandon Craig, who succeeded Mike Henry as chief executive on 1 July, though the year being reported predates him. Much of the operating detail is already out. July’s operational review reported record group iron ore production of 265Mt, up 1%, with Western Australia Iron Ore at a record 257Mt, and copper of 1,953kt, down 3% but within a raised 1,900–2,000kt guidance range – a second consecutive year at roughly 2Mt. Realised copper prices averaged $5.74 a pound, up about 35%, while WAIO iron ore averaged around $84.56 a wet metric tonne.
The forward guidance is where the tension sits: FY27 copper is guided to 1,650–1,800kt, predominantly on grade decline at Escondida, where concentrator feed grade fell to 0.90% in FY26 from 1.02% and is expected near 0.70% in FY27; FY27 iron ore is guided to 260–272Mt; and group capital expenditure is guided at about $11bn for each of FY26 and FY27. BHP also flagged a $2.3bn impairment against Jansen after the potash project’s budget swelled again, with Stage 2 capital lifted to about $6.9bn and Stage 1 to about $8.4bn. Consensus attributable profit is around $12.4bn; the FY26 interim dividend was $0.73 at a 60% payout against a 50% minimum policy, and brokers have been raising final-dividend expectations, with Ord Minnett lifting its payout assumption to 70% and UBS looking for a beat against consensus. The shares closed Friday at A$61.35, down 3.3% on the day, and are up about 47% over twelve months.
Our readThe final dividend is the swing factor – everything above the 50% policy minimum is discretionary, July’s review put expected year-end net debt at about $9bn, and the interim was struck at 60%. It is a board decision rather than a personal statement from a chief executive who arrived after the year-end, but it is the clearest early signal of how the new leadership and the board intend to balance shareholder returns against the copper and Jansen programme. Watch FY27 unit-cost guidance at Escondida against a feed grade heading toward 0.70%, since falling grade raises cost per tonne before it lowers volume; the Jansen line after the $2.3bn impairment, where the question is whether about $15.3bn of total spend is now the number or merely the current number; and iron ore realisations, which are the group’s cash engine regardless of what copper does. The read-across is to Chinese industrial demand, and it lands twice this week – CMOC reports copper and cobalt the following day, and Sinopec closes the week on the same economy from the demand side.
🇺🇸 Analog Devices
$ADI reports fiscal third-quarter results Wednesday before the open – the best available gauge of whether the analog and industrial semiconductor cycle has genuinely turned. The shares closed Friday at $389.39, up 2.2% on the day – about 13% below the $445.91 high set in June, but roughly 74% above a 52-week low of $223.47, which is most of the reason the guide carries more risk than the quarter.
The April quarter was a record on nearly every line: revenue of $3.62bn, up 37% year on year and 15% sequentially; adjusted gross margin of 73.0% against a GAAP 67.3%; adjusted operating margin of 49.0%; and adjusted earnings of $3.09, up 67%, with $734m of free cash flow. Industrial, half of revenue, rose 20% sequentially and 56% year on year. Communications, 15% of revenue, rose 79%, with data centre now more than three-quarters of that segment and growing above 90%. Automotive, at 24%, was the laggard, up 8% sequentially but only 2% year on year. Management described record bookings across its business-to-business markets. Guidance for this quarter is $3.9bn of revenue give or take $100m, adjusted operating margin near 49.0% and adjusted earnings of $3.30 give or take $0.15; consensus sits fractionally above, near $3.93bn and $3.33. In July the company completed its $1.5bn acquisition of Empower Semiconductor, whose integrated voltage regulators and silicon capacitors move power conversion closer to the processor – a direct play at AI datacentre power content.
Our readThe October-quarter guide is the swing factor, not the July quarter, because consensus already sits essentially on the company’s own number while the shares have re-rated roughly 74% off their low on the premise that the industrial recovery is durable rather than a restocking spike. Watch industrial bookings and any commentary on distributor inventory after a quarter that grew 56% year on year – the two indicators most likely to help investors judge how much of the rebound is replenishment and how much is underlying demand; automotive, up only 2% and the one business-to-business market that has not participated; and the communications line, where an increasingly datacentre-weighted mix makes ADI more correlated to AI capex and less to the broad industrial economy than it used to be. Worth noting that chief executive Vincent Roche himself flagged concern about the steepness of the industry’s demand ramp heading into 2027. The read-across runs to Texas Instruments, NXP and the wider analog complex, and through the Empower deal to the datacentre power names.
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🇨🇳 Sinopec
Sinopec’s board meets on Friday 21 August to approve interim results for the six months to 30 June and to consider an interim dividend, with the release following the Hong Kong close – Asia’s largest refiner reporting into a first half where the volume data is already public and points down. July’s operating disclosure showed oil and gas production of 263.5 million barrels of oil equivalent, up 0.3%, but crude throughput of 113.31 million tonnes, down 5.6%, and domestic sales of refined products down 9.2% to 79.0 million tonnes, with declines across gasoline, diesel and kerosene and double-digit falls in light chemical feedstock and products including ethylene and synthetic resins. Crude availability, maintenance turnarounds, export quotas and product spreads all move throughput in any given half. But the cause is structural as much as cyclical: China’s electric-vehicle fleet penetration has reached roughly 13%, new EV registrations are running near half of new vehicle sales, and LNG and electric heavy-truck sales grew 18% and 77% respectively – adoption at that level removes a slice of gasoline and diesel demand that does not come back on a price cycle.
The March quarter, by contrast, was good. Net profit attributable to shareholders rose about 27% to RMB 17.7bn, helped by higher crude prices and steady domestic fuel sales, with chemicals again the weak point. The H-shares closed Friday near HK$4.24 within a 52-week range of about HK$3.98 to HK$5.70, on a trailing yield around 5.3%, and full-year 2025 net profit had fallen 36.8%.
Our readThe interim dividend is the swing factor for a stock that is owned principally for yield – the earnings shape is already largely visible in the published volume and price data, so what is genuinely undecided is how much of it comes back to shareholders. Watch the chemicals segment, still loss-making at the last quarterly disclosure and the part of the group management has said it is pivoting toward; the refining margin per barrel against a throughput base falling faster than most forecasts assumed; and the marketing and distribution segment, where a 9.2% drop in domestic fuel sales meets a fixed retail network. The read-across is to Chinese demand, but it is worth being precise about which kind: the cyclical layer here moves with crude and with spreads, and the substitution running underneath it does not. It is also less market-moving than BHP for much the same macro question, since refining spreads are visible weekly and the stock trades largely as an income instrument.
🇨🇳 Xiaomi
Xiaomi reports second-quarter results Tuesday after the Hong Kong close – the electric-vehicle-versus-handsets margin question, from a stock roughly half its level of a year ago. The shares closed Friday at HK$25.62, down about 52% over twelve months and about 35% this year. The March quarter set the terms: revenue of RMB 99.1bn, down 10.9%; group gross margin of 22.0%; adjusted net profit of RMB 6.07bn, down 43.1%; and a statutory net profit of RMB 4.73bn, down 56.5%. Smartphones shipped 33.8 million units at a record average selling price of RMB 1,310, while research and development rose 33.4% to RMB 9.0bn. The automotive business is where the swing is: 80,856 vehicles delivered, up 6.6%; smart EV revenue of RMB 19bn, up 5.1%; a divisional gross margin of 20.1%; and an operating loss of RMB 3.1bn in the segment, reversing the profit the business had reached in 2025.
The quarter now being reported was the stronger one for volume: 104,199 vehicles delivered from April to June, up about 28% on a year earlier and about 29% on the March quarter. July then slowed to 31,267 units, a fourth consecutive month above 30,000, taking the seven-month total to 216,322 – 39% of a 550,000-unit full-year target, which leaves an average of roughly 66,700 a month required from August to December, more than twice July’s pace. Consensus for this quarter clusters around RMB 107–111bn of revenue and roughly RMB 6.1bn of adjusted profit, which would be another decline of more than 40%. Two things landed after quarter end: the extended-range SkyNomad SUVs, unveiled in late July with deliveries from September, and flagship phone price increases taken in early August as memory costs rose.
Our readAutomotive gross margin is the swing factor – at 20.1% the division still lost RMB 3.1bn at the operating line in the March quarter, and this time it had roughly 28% more volume to absorb those costs, so the question is whether scale outweighs purchase-tax subsidy, component inflation, a lower vehicle average selling price and launch spending. Watch the smartphone gross margin, which fell to 10.1% in the March quarter, against rising memory and storage costs, and whether the early-August price increases arrive too late to show up in this quarter; the delivery cadence against a 550,000 target that is only 39% covered after seven months, which now needs a step-change in the monthly run-rate and makes the second-half guide the more consequential number; and any early commentary on SkyNomad pricing, since an extended-range SUV competes in a different part of the market than the SU7. The read-across runs to the China EV price war and to the memory cycle, and cuts both ways – but this is a Hong Kong evening print with limited US-hours tradability, which puts it behind Alibaba as a market event this week.
🇧🇲 Viking Holdings
$VIK reports second-quarter results Wednesday before the US open – a clean signal on the high-end consumer, and the counterpoint to Walmart’s the following morning. The shares closed Friday at $97.99, down 7.65% on the day after trading as high as $107.75 intraday, against a 52-week range of $56.06 to $110.09. Nothing was announced by the company to explain that: the cruise complex was weaker across the board on Friday, but Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian each gave up less than 3%, and the commentary that followed pointed at pre-earnings positioning and a firmer crude price rather than anything Viking-specific. Even after the reset the shares sit about 63% above where they were a year ago.
The March quarter was seasonally loss-making but improving: revenue of $1,053.7m, up 17.5%; a net loss of $54.2m against $105.5m a year earlier; adjusted EBITDA of $104.8m, up 43.9%; net yield of $596, up 9.5%; and occupancy of 94.7%. The booking curve is the reason the stock is where it is. At 3 May the company had sold 92% of 2026 capacity with $6,225m of advance bookings, up 13%, at $842 per passenger cruise day, up 5.5%; and 38% of 2027 capacity with $3,403m of advance bookings, up 31%, at $986 per passenger cruise day, up 11.0% – all of that on capacity growing 7% in 2026 and 15% in 2027. The fleet reached 92 vessels in the first quarter against 80 a year earlier, with two ocean ships and nine river vessels expected across 2026. This is also the first quarter reported since May’s leadership change: Leah Talactac moved from president and chief financial officer to chief executive on 14 May, founder Torstein Hagen became executive chairman, and Linh Banh was promoted to chief financial officer – a transition announced alongside the first-quarter release, so only about half the quarter fell under the new structure.
Our readThe 2027 booking curve is the swing factor – pricing 11% above the same point a year earlier while adding 15% capacity is the whole bull case. Friday’s sell-off reset the entry point without changing what is being asked of the numbers: a 63% twelve-month gain still assumes that premium holds. Watch whether it does as the 2027 book fills past 38%, because that average is struck on a book little more than a third full, and early-curve pricing does not automatically survive the inventory that fills the rest of it; occupancy against 94.7%, where there is very little room to improve and some to lose; and onboard and ancillary spend, the part of the model that responds to discretionary income now rather than to a deposit taken a year ago. The read-through largely stops at travel – Viking’s river, ocean and expedition products all sell to the same affluent, older customer, and its bookings say little about the shopper Walmart is describing the next morning. That contrast is arguably the point: the two prints land 24 hours apart on opposite ends of the same consumer.
Weekly Calendar
Some notable names reporting this week:
| Company | Country | Sector | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday 18-Aug | |||
| BHP Group | 🇦🇺 | Diversified mining | BMO |
| The Home Depot | 🇺🇸 | Home improvement retail | BMO |
| CSL | 🇦🇺 | Plasma therapies & vaccines | BMO |
| Baidu | 🇨🇳 | Search / AI cloud | BMO |
| Xiaomi | 🇨🇳 | Consumer electronics & EVs | AMC |
| Keysight Technologies | 🇺🇸 | Electronic test & measurement | AMC |
| Wednesday 19-Aug | |||
| Analog Devices | 🇺🇸 | Analog & mixed-signal semiconductors | BMO |
| The TJX Companies | 🇺🇸 | Off-price retail | BMO |
| Lowe’s Companies | 🇺🇸 | Home improvement retail | BMO |
| Target | 🇺🇸 | General merchandise retail | BMO |
| Viking Holdings | 🇧🇲 | Cruise & travel | BMO |
| The Estée Lauder Companies | 🇺🇸 | Beauty & personal care | BMO |
| Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing | 🇭🇰 | Exchanges & market infrastructure | Intraday |
| CMOC Group | 🇨🇳 | Copper & cobalt mining | AMC |
| Thursday 20-Aug | |||
| Walmart | 🇺🇸 | Mass-market retail | BMO |
| Alibaba Group | 🇨🇳 | E-commerce / cloud & AI | BMO |
| Deere & Company | 🇺🇸 | Agricultural & construction machinery | BMO |
| AIA Group | 🇭🇰 | Life insurance (Asia) | BMO |
| Ping An Insurance | 🇨🇳 | Insurance & financial services | AMC |
| NetEase | 🇨🇳 | Online games | BMO |
| Ross Stores | 🇺🇸 | Off-price retail | AMC |
| Friday 21-Aug | |||
| Sinopec | 🇨🇳 | Refining & petrochemicals | AMC |