Compare moats
Up to three covered companies, band by band. Every call is a curated editorial judgment, never a disclosed figure — and every band carries its cited basis.
| Adobe | Netlist | RELX plc | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow The FY2025 10-K's own Competition section says the markets for Adobe's solutions are characterized by 'limited barriers to entry, short product lifecycles, customer price sensitivity ... and the frequent entry of new solutions or competitors', and Item 1A adds that Adobe 'face[s] increasing competition from companies offering generative and agentic AI solutions, including but not limited to prompt-based and multi-modal creation and editing, document productivity and understanding' - the two categories that carry the Digital Media segment. That disclosed contestability caps the moat below wide, while the same filing's industry-standard app designations and 89% consolidated gross margin keep it well above none. | narrow Netlist's patents have now brought licence payments from all three big DRAM makers, which is the strongest evidence that they matter. Blocks & Files (2026-10-08) says Netlist 'has now won IP disputes against Micron, Samsung and SK hynix over its memory technology, gaining fees valued at $1.54 billion'. In August 2026, Samsung agreed to pay Netlist '$897 million over 5 years in licensing fees' (Blocks & Files). That figure is a ceiling: Netlist's Form 8-K (2026-08-05) sets Samsung's quarterly fees at 'up to US$32.9 million' each, calculated by 'a revenue-based formula' and 'subject to certain adjustments and refund rights of Samsung'. In October 2026, Micron agreed to pay '$30 million per quarter from the fourth quarter of 2026 through the third quarter of 2031, totaling $600 million' for a five-year licence (Netlist release, 2026-10-06). SK hynix's dispute ended in April 2021 with a '$40 million settlement, a cross-licensing deal and a supply arrangement' (Blocks & Files). The moat is narrow, not wide, because it is time-limited and contested. Both new licences run five years. On 2026-09-02 the Federal Circuit upheld PTAB decisions finding all challenged claims of Netlist's '339, '918 and '054 patents unpatentable as obvious (IPWatchdog). The FY2025 10-K says 'all of our issued patents will eventually expire'. The product business has no such protection: 2025 gross profit was $11.4 million on net sales of $188.6 million (results release, 2026-03-03). | wide Independent sources support entrenched positions in RELX's two content businesses. In legal research, a Stanford-led study of legal AI tools (arXiv 2405.20362v1, 2024-05-30, https://arxiv.org/html/2405.20362v1) says Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis "have historically enjoyed a virtual duopoly over the legal research market" (citing a 2006 article for that point) and "continue to be two of the largest incumbents now selling legal AI products". In scientific publishing, Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon in PLOS ONE (2015-06-10, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502) found Reed-Elsevier published 24.1% of natural and medical sciences papers in 2013, the largest share, and that its Scientific, Technical & Medical division's profit margin "steadily increased from 30.6% to 38.9% between 2006 and 2013." RELX's 2025 Annual Report (published 2026-02-19) shows the economics continuing: revenue of £9,590m, adjusted operating profit of £3,342m and an adjusted operating margin of 34.8% against 33.9% in 2024, with 54% of revenue from subscriptions. The limits are in the same report. Its principal risks say "We operate in highly competitive and dynamic markets" that change with "technological innovations, such as the use of artificial intelligence" and "the entrance of new competitors". Exhibitions holds "a global market share of less than 10%" in "a fragmented industry", and the Chair noted "share price volatility across a number of sectors, including software and data services." Long-held positions in legal research and scientific publishing, with margins that have kept rising, support a wide rating. The main threat is AI-native competition, which has not yet slowed reported growth. |
| Moat type | switching costs The 10-K frames Adobe's differentiation as an integrated ecosystem the customer's work lives inside: Creative Cloud Pro subscribers get 'cloud storage to easily sync, access, collaborate and share their work, files and assets', the AI platform offers a choice of models 'without the friction of switching between workflows and platforms', and on the enterprise side 'Our competitive differentiation comes from the increased value we provide customers by integrating the Adobe Experience Platform with our comprehensive set of solutions'. 96% of FY2025 revenue is subscription, with $22.52B of remaining performance obligations, up 13% year over year. | intangibles ip The advantage is the patent portfolio, enforced in court; scale and customer lock-in play no part. The FY2025 10-K reports 'over 200 issued patents and pending patent applications worldwide' as of December 27, 2025. It says the company's business strategy 'includes litigating claims against others, such as our competitors and customers, to enforce our intellectual property rights'. Netlist says it invented the distributed buffer architecture and that 'The memory industry has widely adopted our distributed architecture for DDR4 LRDIMM'. It also says 'many in the memory industry have now adopted our approach' to on-module power management 'for their DDR5-based DIMMs'. Those are the company's own claims. The licences give them outside weight: Micron's covers 'patents covering server DIMMs and High Bandwidth Memory technologies' (Netlist release, 2026-10-06), and Samsung's covers Netlist's 'complete patent portfolio, including its server DIMM and High Bandwidth Memory technologies' (Netlist release, 2026-08-05). | intangibles ip RELX says its advantage is proprietary content and data. The 2025 Annual Report says it builds products by combining "our unique content and comprehensive data sets with advanced technologies", describes Lexis+ AI as "built and trained on one of the world's largest repositories of accurate and exclusive legal content", and cites more than 3,000 Elsevier journals including the Cell Press and The Lancet families. On the H1 2026 results call (2026-07-23, https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/investors/transcripts/first-half-results-2026-transcript.pdf) the CEO said Risk grows by "leveraging our unique contributory and proprietary datasets, with over 90% of revenue coming from machine-to-machine interactions." Independent support comes from PLOS ONE (2015), which says libraries face a publisher oligopoly in which "each product represents a unique value and cannot be replaced". According to the annual report, in June 2025 LexisNexis agreed a strategic alliance with Harvey, an AI platform for legal and professional services, under which LexisNexis "will integrate its Lexis+ AI capabilities (powered by LexisNexis content) within the Harvey platform". Switching costs add to this: legal products are sold "on a paid subscription basis, with subscriptions often under multi-year contracts." |
| Leadership | clear leader In the segment that is 74% of FY2025 revenue ($17.65B of $23.77B) the 10-K asserts leadership outright: Illustrator 'our industry-standard vector graphics app', After Effects 'our industry-standard motion graphics and visual effects app', Acrobat 'a leading document productivity app', and 'category and brand leadership' in the Competition section. The claim does not extend to the whole company - the same section says the marketing solutions 'face broad competition from large, established enterprise software and cloud companies'. | behind As a product company Netlist is a small player against much larger rivals. The FY2025 10-K says it faces 'competition from DRAM suppliers, memory module providers and logic suppliers'. It says 'many of our competitors have substantially greater financial, technical, marketing, distribution and other resources, broader product lines, lower cost structures, greater brand recognition, more influence on industry standards, more extensive or established patent portfolios'. Its suppliers are potential rivals: 'some of our significant suppliers could choose to sell component products to customers directly'. It had 72 employees at the end of 2025. Samsung, Micron and SK hynix have licensed its patents (Blocks & Files, 2026-10-08), but that is licence income, not product leadership, so the band is behind. | co leader RELX's own 2025 Annual Report ranks its businesses as Risk "Key verticals #1", STM "Global #1", Legal "US #2" and "Outside US #1 or #2", and Exhibitions "Global #2". Independent sources, both dated, support two of these. PLOS ONE (2015) puts Reed-Elsevier first in natural and medical sciences publishing with 24.1% of 2013 papers, ahead of Springer (11.9%) and Wiley-Blackwell (11.3%). The Stanford study (2024-05-30) describes legal research as a historical duopoly of Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, and found that "Lexis+ AI is the highest-performing system we test, answering 65% of our queries accurately." The publishing data is from 2013, Legal is second in the U.S. by RELX's own account, and the Risk and Exhibitions ranks are the company's own claims. That supports co-leader, not clear leader. |
| Pricing power | strong Per the same 10-K's segment table, Digital Media earned a 95% gross profit margin in FY2025 (96% FY2024, 95% FY2023) and consolidated gross margin held at 88%/89%/89% across FY2023-FY2025 while revenue grew 11% to $23.77B. 96% of revenue is subscription and remaining performance obligations reached $22.52B, up 13%. Item 1A's warning of 'downward pressure on pricing and gross margins' has not shown up in realized margin. | weak The product business has little pricing power. Full-year 2025 gross profit was $11.4 million on net sales of $188.6 million (results release, 2026-03-03). Q2 2026 gross profit was $22.9 million on net sales of $109.8 million (results release, 2026-07-30). The FY2025 10-K says 'large or key customers exert pressure on us to make concessions in the prices at which we sell products to them'. It says that when component prices rise 'we generally cannot pass the price increases through to our customers for products purchased under an existing purchase order'. Gross margin on resales 'is typically lower than our gross margin on sales of our own memory subsystem products'. The licence fees are set by the settlement terms for five years, though Samsung's quarterly fees follow 'a revenue-based formula' and 'may be subject to certain adjustments and refund rights of Samsung' (Form 8-K, 2026-08-05). Micron pays '$30 million a quarter until the third quarter of 2031', and Samsung pays an upfront '$239 million' plus 'quarterly payments of up to $32.9 million gross' (Blocks & Files, 2026-10-08). | moderate The 2025 Annual Report says RELX products "often account for less than 1% of our customers' total cost base but can have a significant and positive impact on the economics of the remaining 99%", and reports a group adjusted operating margin of 34.8% in 2025 against 33.9% in 2024. On the H1 2026 call the CFO reported a margin of 35.5%. He attributed the gains to cost discipline: "we focus on ensuring that cost growth remains below revenue growth in all of our businesses." The CEO said that "roughly 3/4 of the renewal value is coming from the Lexis+ with Protégé package", which means renewals are moving customers onto the higher-value AI platform. Independent evidence on Elsevier is older. PLOS ONE (2015) says libraries "have to manage with less as prices increase" and that, because of the oligopoly, they are "more or less helpless". It also found the STM division's profit margin never fell below 30% over the 1991-2013 period it studied. RELX does not disclose list-price increases. Most of the evidence is margin-based. The margins are high and rising, but management credits the gains to keeping cost growth below revenue growth, and the only independent evidence of price increases is from 2015. That supports moderate, not strong, pricing power. |
| Summary | Adobe's durable advantage is the cost of leaving rather than any disclosed market share. Its FY2025 10-K calls Illustrator 'our industry-standard vector graphics app' and After Effects 'our industry-standard motion graphics and visual effects app', describes Acrobat as 'a leading document productivity app', and sells them as one subscription ecosystem where assets, workflows and collaboration are cloud-resident. The economics follow: Digital Media earned a 95% gross profit margin on $17.65B of FY2025 revenue, 74% of the company. The same filing is unusually candid about the limits, calling its markets characterized by 'limited barriers to entry' and warning that competition will 'continue to intensify' with named generative and agentic AI entrants in both creation and document productivity - so the moat reads narrow rather than wide, held today by realized pricing and switching costs rather than by structural protection. | Netlist is a memory company in Irvine, California, with 72 employees (FY2025 10-K). It sells specialty memory modules to OEMs and resells memory and storage components. The 10-K says 'In recent periods, a large portion of our net product sales were generated from resales', in some past periods much of it sourced from SK hynix under a supply agreement that 'expires in April 2026'. Since 2000 it has been profitable in only two fiscal years, 2006 and 2021 (10-K). Blocks & Files (2026-10-08) says it has been 'largely loss-making' since its 2006 IPO, and that the first half of 2026 was profitable before the larger Samsung and Micron licence payments. Its value lies in patents on server memory modules and HBM, which it has fought over in court for years. Samsung faced 'a $303 million jury award' in April 2023 (IP Fray, 2026-08-05). In 2026 those fights became licence fees. Samsung signed a five-year cross licence, settled all pending actions and gave Netlist the right to buy 'up to $1.5 billion of DRAM and NAND products over five years' (Blocks & Files). Micron signed a five-year licence and settled in October. Before that, IP Fray (2026-08-13) reported Netlist going after Micron, HPE and Lenovo at the ITC and in district court after the Samsung deal; IP Fray (2026-10-06) says the Micron settlement 'ends all pending legal proceedings between the companies'. A case against Google over a rank-multiplication patent has been open since 2008 (Blocks & Files). | RELX sells information-based analytics and decision tools in four business areas. In 2025, per its Annual Report, Risk (LexisNexis Risk Solutions) had revenue of £3,485m and adjusted operating profit of £1,305m; Scientific, Technical & Medical (Elsevier) £2,714m and £1,035m; Legal (LexisNexis Legal & Professional) £1,806m and £415m; and Exhibitions (RX) £1,186m and £410m. The moat rests on content and data that are hard to replicate. A Stanford study describes a historical Westlaw-LexisNexis "virtual duopoly" in legal research. A PLOS ONE study found Reed-Elsevier the largest publisher of natural and medical sciences papers in 2013, and RELX reports that Elsevier articles accounted for "over 18% of global research output and 29% of citations" in its latest comparison. Risk is built on contributory databases such as the C.L.U.E. claims history database, which "collects and reports up to seven years of US personal automobile, property claims and small business information". The products are cheap relative to what customers spend: RELX says they "often account for less than 1% of our customers' total cost base". Group adjusted operating margin rose to 34.8% in 2025 and to 35.5% in the first half of 2026. AI is the main test of the moat. RELX is turning it into upsell: about 90% of Legal new-sales value now comes from the AI-enabled Lexis+ with Protégé platform, and Legal underlying revenue growth reached 10% in H1 2026. On the same call, an analyst cited AI-native legal players Harvey and Legora with combined annual recurring revenue above $400 million, and the CEO said RELX is "not going to be the leader" in the much larger legal workflow software market. RELX names the shift to open access as a principal risk for Elsevier. On the 2026 call, an analyst raised a U.S. OMB proposal to make journal subscription costs and article processing charges unallowable expenses on federal research awards. |
| Chain position | An AI-application layer company that both builds its own commercially safe Firefly foundation models and licenses 'an extensive ecosystem of third-party models', distributing generative AI into creative, document and marketing workflows. | Memory-module maker and component reseller between the DRAM and NAND makers that supply it (SK hynix, under a 2021 supply agreement the FY2025 10-K says 'expires in April 2026', and Samsung under the 2026 supply agreement) and server OEMs, storage, system-builder and data-center customers. It also licenses its patents to Samsung, Micron and SK hynix. | An AI-application-layer user of frontier models: on the H1 2026 call the CEO said RELX takes AI tools "from the sort of frontier lab companies" and runs them inside its own products on verified content. The 2025 Annual Report says LexisNexis will integrate Lexis+ AI capabilities, powered by LexisNexis content, within the Harvey platform. |
| Products (share / barrier) |
|
|
|
| Long-horizon vote | +0.24 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.15 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.30 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |