Dozens of Australian companies are set to reveal how soaring fuel costs and rising wages have impacted their bottom lines in what’s expected to be another wild earnings season.
Wealth manager AMP, oil and gas producer Beach Energy and sleep science group ResMed are among those releasing full-year earnings this week.
They will be followed by disclosures from Commonwealth Bank and Telstra next week, with more big names to come during August.
“For the first time in more than two years, we’re expecting good profit growth in the Australian index overall,” Moomoo Australia chief executive Michael McCarthy said.
As a group, the nation’s top 200 biggest companies have delivered declining full-year profits for three straight years, alongside weaker commodity prices and rising costs.
“But this year, we’re looking for all the stars to line up and deliver around 12 per cent earnings growth across the top 200 companies,” Mr McCarthy told AAP.
Analysts will be watching the extent to which companies have been able to maintain profit margins given the spike in energy costs due to the Middle East conflict and legislated and negotiated wage increases.
“It’s very, very clear there’s going to be additional pressure on margins, so those two cost areas, I think, will be a focus for us this season, and they’re likely to affect businesses in different ways,” Mr McCarthy said.
Labour-intensive businesses, such as banks, might be particularly impacted by wage increases.
Analysts will also be watching whether banks report more bad or doubtful debts – loans that might not be repaid – given current high interest rates and tighter household budgets.
“The concern here is that the banks will take a conservative approach and step on the gas when it comes to providing for bad loans,” Mr McCarthy said.
A decline in housing prices, exacerbated by changes to negative gearing, might also weigh on banks’ bottom lines, particularly Westpac and CBA, IG senior market analyst Tony Sycamore said.
Residential mortgages make up 45 to 50 per cent of the big four banks’ total assets, so any sustained softening in property prices raised risks around mortgage stress, credit appetite and bad debts, Mr Sycamore said.
Auscap Asset Management founder and chief investment officer Tim Carleton expects big retailers to perform well despite record-low consumer sentiment.
“The market often overestimates the impact of consumer confidence on revenues and earnings of businesses,” he said.
The biggest factors driving year-on-year growth for discretionary retailers such as JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman are population growth, inflation and employment.
“Consumer confidence has almost zero correlation,” Mr Carleton said, noting Auscap had examined the Australian Bureau of Statistics data on this going back to 1960.
Population growth had been relatively strong, unemployment was at just 4.4 per cent, and the workforce participation rate was near record levels, he noted, so Auscap expected relatively robust retail sales overall.
Department store group Myer has blamed dismal consumer sentiment and a warmer-than-average start to winter in most major Australian cities for a decline in sales in June and July.
The past two earnings seasons – in February 2026 and August 2025 – were the most volatile on record.
Even blue-chip companies Woolworths and Cochlear suffered double-digit share-price swings after delivering their results.
Mr Carleton expects more of the same this earnings season, after attributing the wild swings of the past two seasons to a decline in the number of fund managers that focus on a business’s fundamentals.
Instead, there are now more quantitative or systematic managers who trade passively based on algorithms or systems.
“So if their signal suddenly tells them to sell something, they’re all running for the door at the same time,” Mr Carleton said.
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