Profitability margins
Gross margin stability: 1.51 to 11.74
Gross margin stability over ten filed years for eight companies: the widest band is 11.74 points, the narrowest 1.51, and the thinnest margins are steadiest.
By Javier SanzPublished
Founder of ValueScreener. Built Ninety Nine, a securities services provider, and sold it to a tier-one global bank; ran operations and internationalization at Alpaca, the brokerage API.
Who writes thisEditorial processLinkedIn (opens in a new tab)X (opens in a new tab)
Measured over ten filed fiscal years for the eight companies the open research section covers, read 2026-09-07, gross margin stability ranges from a band of 1.51 percentage points at Walmart to 11.74 at Texas Instruments. The two steadiest margins in the sample belong to the two companies with the lowest margins in it, whose return on assets comes from turnover rather than from margin.
A stable gross margin is usually read as evidence of pricing power. On this sample it is closer to the opposite.
The sample, and why it is this one
The open research section already publishes ten-year rule results for eight companies: Apple, Costco, Johnson and Johnson, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Nike, Texas Instruments and Walmart. That set was chosen before this post existed and is visible on the site, so it is not a sample assembled to make a point. It is eight large US companies with ten filed fiscal years each, which is a strong selection in a particular direction, and the conclusions below are about these eight and nothing more.
Ten years of gross margin, sorted by how much it moved
| Company | Fiscal years | Low | High | Ten-year band | First year | Last year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Walmart | 2017 to 2026 | 24.14 | 25.65 | 1.51 | 25.65 | 24.93 |
| Costco | 2016 to 2025 | 10.78 | 13.32 | 2.54 | 13.32 | 12.84 |
| Nike | 2017 to 2026 | 42.73 | 45.98 | 3.25 | 44.58 | 42.91 |
| Coca-Cola | 2016 to 2025 | 58.14 | 62.11 | 3.97 | 60.67 | 61.63 |
| Johnson and Johnson | 2016 to 2025 | 65.58 | 70.28 | 4.70 | 69.69 | 67.88 |
| Microsoft | 2017 to 2026 | 64.52 | 69.76 | 5.24 | 64.52 | 67.94 |
| Apple | 2016 to 2025 | 37.82 | 46.91 | 9.09 | 39.08 | 46.91 |
| Texas Instruments | 2016 to 2025 | 57.02 | 68.76 | 11.74 | 61.76 | 57.02 |
Walmart's gross margin has stayed inside a band of 1.51 percentage points for a decade, on a margin of about 25 percent. Costco's has stayed inside 2.54 points on a margin of about 13. Texas Instruments, at 57 to 69 percent, has moved across 11.74 points in the same span.
If the steadiness of a gross margin were a reading on pricing power, the two retailers would be the two strongest names on this list. They are not usually described that way, and the reason is that a low margin held constant is a different thing from a high margin held constant. A grocery retailer's gross margin is close to a policy variable: it is set by a markup rule applied across millions of items, and it moves only when the rule moves. A semiconductor company's is an outcome of the product cycle, the utilisation of expensive plant and the mix of what shipped.
Both are stable in the statistical sense. Only one of them is stable because nothing is happening to it.
A range hides the direction, and the direction is the finding
Apple and Texas Instruments have the two widest bands here, 9.09 and 11.74 points, and they are moving in opposite directions.
Texas Instruments peaked at 68.76 percent in fiscal 2022 and has fallen every year since: 62.90, then 58.14, then 57.02. The high and the low of the whole decade are three years apart, and the fall between them, 11.74 points, is the entire ten-year range.
Apple's gross margin fell in each of the three years to fiscal 2019, from 39.08 to 37.82, and has risen every year since to 46.91 in fiscal 2025.
Two companies with a similar spread and nothing else in common. Any measure of stability that is computed as a range, a standard deviation or a coefficient of variation gives these two similar scores, and the similarity is an artefact of the statistic.
The comparison that puts these bands in proportion
On the same 2026-09-07 build, the interquartile range of gross margin across the 2,401 companies in the cohort runs from 23.65 to 61.35. That is a 37.70 point spread between the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentile company on one day.
The widest ten-year band in the table above is 11.74. Every one of these eight companies moved less across a decade than the middle half of the market differs by at any instant.
That has a practical consequence for a guardrail. A rule written on a company's own gross margin is testing against a figure that historically moves a few points a decade, so a threshold set anywhere near the current level will fire on noise, and a threshold set several points away may never fire at all. Where to put it is a judgement about the specific business, and there is no cross-company answer to borrow.
Filed figures from SEC EDGAR. This is a computation on public filings, not a recommendation, and not advice. Past filings do not indicate future results.
What this leaves out
Eight companies. Large, long-lived, US-listed, all with a full ten filed years, and all already published on this site for other reasons. That is a strong selection and none of the numbers above generalise to the market.
Ten fiscal years is the whole archive, not the whole company. Several of these have filed for forty years and the archive holds ten.
Fiscal years are not calendar years and they do not line up across the eight. Walmart's fiscal 2026 ended in January 2026, Microsoft's in June, Apple's in September. Comparing a band width across the eight is fair. Comparing any single year across the eight is not.
The registry does hold a gross margin stability figure computed across the filed years, and this build publishes no market-wide distribution for it, so there is no percentile to place any of these eight against. The comparison above is against the cross-sectional spread of the level, which is a different statistic and is labelled as such.
Nothing here is a view on any of the eight companies or on any security.