Tariff tumult is forcing companies to confront an uncomfortable new reality: They have no earthly idea what their profits will be in this quarter or the next. In response, some CEOs are abandoning the sacred tradition of predicting quarterly profits for investors and Wall Street analysts to obsess over. Those CEOs may soon wish they had made the change long ago.
The trend is spanning quickly across industries. “We do not expect most tech companies to give any guidance on the 1Q conference calls over the next month including Apple,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a recent note to investors. The reason: “too much uncertainty.” CarMax told investors its financial goals remain the same, but it scrapped its timeline for reaching them because of “the potential impact of broader macro factors.” Delta Air Lines has withdrawn its entire 2025 performance guidance because, as CEO Ed Bastian said, “the level of uncertainty” is “a bit unprecedented.”
CEOs of those and other companies, freed of ginning up quarterly profit predictions, may realize that profits are unpredictable all the time, not just amid extraordinary uncertainty. So why try to foresee the unforeseeable at all? No rule requires companies to predict performance. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has never given guidance, which hasn’t prevented it from achieving stupendous performance. Another company in the performance pantheon, Amazon, has never provided earnings-per-share guidance. Coca-Cola gave up guidance in 2002.
The problems with guidance aren’t just that it devotes time and money to an impossible task. Quarterly guidance also incentivizes bad behavior. It happens all the time. The quarter is about to end and the company won’t reach the numbers it announced, so it ships extra products to dealers or distributors and counts that as revenue. It’s called channel stuffing or trade loading. The company meets guidance but may have committed a crime, and in any case it might have to do the same thing at the end of the next quarter now that the channel is filled with product that was attributed to the previous quarter. Company leaders focus on the short term, not the long term.
Most CEOs hate quarterly guidance but feel they must provide it. For them, today’s global economic chaos is a perfect opportunity to break the habit. Virtually any CEO can now state unabashedly that next quarter’s profits are unknowable, and investors won’t be alarmed. They’ll nod their heads and think, “Of course.” By the time things eventually settle down, earnings calls without quarterly guidance will feel like the new normal. Companies—and their investors—will be better off.