No 10-Q: what you get and don't get from a foreign issuer

If you go looking for ASML’s latest 10-Q you will not find one. The same is true of TSMC, SAP, Alibaba, Arm, Spotify and Sea. None of them files quarterly reports with the SEC, and none of them is doing anything wrong.

They are foreign private issuers, and they file under a different set of forms. The financial statements are still there. Several other things are not, and knowing which is the difference between reading these companies properly and quietly assuming a gap is a red flag.

The two form sets

The pattern: the annual disclosure is broadly comparable; the interim disclosure is not.

A 20-F is a substantial document. It carries audited statements, risk factors, an operating and financial review, and governance disclosure. What disappears is the quarterly cadence around it.

What a 6-K actually is

This is the part that surprises people. A 6-K is not the foreign equivalent of an 8-K or a 10-Q. It is a cover page attached to material the company has already made public somewhere else — a press release, a stock-exchange announcement, an interim report required by its home regulator.

The consequence is that 6-K content varies enormously by company, because what triggers it is home country practice rather than an SEC list.

A concrete example. monday.com, an Israeli issuer, filed a 6-K on 10 August 2026 for its June quarter. It contained:

• Exhibit 99.1 — the earnings release, including full income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement with three-month and six-month columns
• Exhibit 99.3 — a management’s discussion and analysis

That is more than the minimum. But the MD&A carried this heading:

H1 2026 — Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, as of June 30, 2026 and for the six-month period then ended

Semi-annual, not quarterly. The June quarter’s figures are in the statements; there is no management discussion of that quarter by itself, because none is required.

That distinction is not academic. In that filing, six-month operating cash flow was down 10.5% year over year, which the MD&A states. The June quarter alone was down 17.2%, which it does not — that number exists only in the three-month column of the cash flow statement. What that quarter looked like once the columns are separated is worked through in the monday.com quarter itself.

Six months 2026   $160,041K      vs 2025  $178,807K     −10.5%   ← stated in the MD&A
Q2 2026          $55,354K      vs 2025   $66,837K     −17.2%   ← statements only
Q1 2026 (derived)$104,687K      vs 2025  $111,970K      −6.5%

Nothing is withheld. The arithmetic is available to anyone who reads the columns. But a reader relying on the narrative gets the half, and the half is the milder number.

Practical consequences

Quarterly series will have holes. Some foreign issuers report half-yearly only. Building a quarterly model across a mixed universe means either interpolating or excluding, and both choices should be stated.

“No 8-K” is not “no news.” Material events still get disclosed, via 6-K, on the home market’s timetable. If you are watching for a filing that never comes, you may be watching the wrong form.

Insider transactions are usually invisible. Foreign private issuers are generally exempt from Section 16 reporting, so the Form 4 flow that exists for domestic companies is absent. Home-country disclosure may substitute, at a different frequency and in a different language.

Accounting may not be US GAAP. A 20-F may present IFRS without reconciliation. Line items that look comparable to a US peer sometimes are not — development cost capitalisation and lease presentation are the usual places this bites.

The status can change. It is tested annually, and companies cross the line in both directions:

When a company transitions, its disclosure gets more detailed, and a year-over-year comparison of what you can see is no longer like for like.

How to read one efficiently

1. Start with the 20-F, not the 6-K. It is the annual document with risk factors and the operating review, and it is where the framing lives.
2. Pull the 6-K list and read the exhibit titles. That tells you what the company chooses to file, which varies more than the form name suggests.
3. Go to the statements, not the narrative, for anything quarterly. Check whether the columns are three-month, six-month, or both.
4. Derive the missing quarter by subtraction when only cumulative columns are given, and label it as derived.
5. Check the accounting basis before comparing to a US peer.

What would make this wrong

• This is a description of disclosure practice, not legal advice. The tests that determine foreign private issuer status are in Exchange Act Rule 3b-4 and turn on facts about shareholders and US business contacts that are not visible from outside.
• Practice varies widely. Some foreign issuers voluntarily file quarterly reports of 10-Q-like depth. The generalisations here describe what is required, not what every company does.
• The 13 companies checked are a convenience sample, chosen because they are widely held US listings. They are not a random draw and the proportions are not an estimate of anything.
• Filing status can have changed since this was written. The determination is annual, and the table above reflects EDGAR as of the date at the top of this page.

Check it yourself

Every filing type is searchable on EDGAR by company and form. Pull a company’s submission history, filter to 20-F and 6-K, and read the exhibit list on any recent 6-K — that alone tells you what this issuer does and does not put in front of US investors.

If something here does not match the filings, tell us and it will be corrected on the article and on the corrections log, with the date.