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.
| ASE Technology Holding | NetApp | Apple | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow The FY2025 20-F argues ASEH out-competes IDM in-house lines because serving "a large base of customers across a wide range of products" lets it "reduce costs and shorten production cycles through high-capacity utilization and process expertise" and gives its equipment "a longer useful life" — a real but bounded edge, since the same filing calls the global packaging and testing market "highly competitive", notes "most of our customers obtain services from more than one source", flags foundry encroachment ("TSMC has offered advanced packaging technologies such as integrated fan-out"), and warns that "some of our competitors may have superior financial, marketing, manufacturing, research and development and technological resources than we do", offering P.R.C. government support of its domestic semiconductor companies as the example. | narrow The FY2026 10-K shows a real, durable lock but not an unassailable one. On the durable side: "Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings", and the same filing's income statement shows the company holding a gross margin near 71% across all three reported years - $4,433M on $6,268M in FY2024, $4,613M on $6,572M in FY2025 and $4,899M on $6,925M in FY2026 - while revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M and income from operations widened from 19% to 24% of net revenues. Holding that margin through the memory-cost shock the same filing discloses is the commercial evidence the lock is worth something. On the limiting side, the filing says competition "is intense", that in public cloud "customers may choose native cloud services that are consumed as operating expenses", and that "New competitors or alliances among existing competitors could emerge and quickly gain significant market share" - and IDC's 1Q26 external-storage tracker (Blocks & Files, 2026-06-16, cited on the AFF/ASA product row below) ranks NetApp second behind Dell, not first. | narrow Argued, not assumed. The FY2025 10-K does evidence a real moat in margin: total gross margin percentage rose 44.1% (2023) to 46.2% (2024) to 46.9% (2025) in markets the same filing describes as characterised by 'aggressive price competition, downward pressure on gross margins.' But the filing bounds the claim itself: it concedes 'a minority market share in the global smartphone, personal computer, tablet and wearables markets,' it discloses no retention, active-device or installed-base figure anywhere (its only 'large installed bases of active devices' reference describes competitors), and it discloses that both of the highest-margin layers are already being cut down by force -- Apple is 'currently subject to a court order preventing it from imposing any commission or fee on certain purchases' on the U.S. App Store storefront, has had to open 'alternative methods of distribution for iOS and iPadOS apps, alternative payment processing' in the EU, and warns that a reversal on appeal in the Google search case could impose remedies 'prohibiting Google from offering the Company commercial terms for search distribution.' A moat that earns 46.9% gross margin but whose most profitable layer is being narrowed by two courts and a regulator is narrow, not wide. |
| Moat type | cost scale The advantage the 20-F actually claims is unit economics from volume, not lock-in: specialization and "economies of scale by providing services to a large base of customers", high capacity utilization spreading "relatively high fixed costs", and equipment that lasts longer because of the breadth of the order book. Capital intensity reinforces it — the filing says "semiconductor businesses are capital intensive and require significant investment in expensive equipment manufactured by a limited number of vendors", with the equipment market itself "characterized by intense demand, limited supply, and long delivery cycles". | switching costs The FY2026 10-K makes the source of the advantage explicit and it is the cost of leaving the data-management layer, not a network or a patent estate. The same ONTAP software runs the on-premises arrays and the cloud services ("Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings"), and the AFF family "allows customers to connect to clouds for more data services, data tiering, caching, and disaster recovery". A customer's volume layout, snapshot and replication workflow and operating tools therefore carry from the array into Azure, AWS and Google rather than being abandoned at the cloud boundary — the filing describes NetApp as "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers", so the usual moment of escape is instead the moment the relationship renews. | switching costs The 10-K locates the durable advantage in an integrated stack and its third-party ecosystem, not in patents: it names 'a strong third-party software and accessories ecosystem' among the principal competitive factors and states the Company 'designs and develops nearly the entire solution for its products, including the hardware, operating system, numerous software applications and related services,' while explicitly disclaiming IP as the source -- 'No single intellectual property right is solely responsible for protecting the Company's products and services' and the Company 'relies primarily on the innovative skills, technical competence and marketing abilities of its personnel.' The remedies now in force confirm the diagnosis negatively: the same filing describes being required to permit alternative distribution and alternative payment processing in the EU and being barred from charging commission on certain linked-out purchases in the U.S. -- remedies aimed squarely at lowering the cost of leaving Apple's rails, which is what a switching-cost moat is. |
| Leadership | co leader The 20-F calls ASEH "a leading provider of semiconductor manufacturing services in assembly and testing" and "a market leader in SiP technologies from design to assembly with high-volume manufacturing", and says it has "established ourselves as a leader through the successful introduction of leading-edge advanced packaging solutions, which have played a pivotal role in bringing advanced ASIC and HBM products to the marketplace" — but the hedged "we believe we are among the leaders in such packaging processes and technologies", alongside named consolidating rivals (Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology/STATS ChipPAC, Amkor/J-Devices, Tianshui Huatian Technology/Unisem) and TSMC's InFO, describes shared rather than sole leadership. | co leader IDC's 1Q26 external enterprise storage systems tracker, as reported by Blocks & Files on 2026-06-16 (cited in full on the AFF/ASA product row below), ranks NetApp second worldwide behind Dell and ahead of Everpure, Huawei and HPE, attributing the placing to "its growing all-flash business and cloud-integrated data management". Second of five ranked vendors, in a market whose leader is someone else, is a shared front rank rather than an owned one - and the distinct claim NetApp makes in the FY2026 10-K is positional rather than volumetric: being "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers". | fast follower Apple leads on integration and margin rather than on units, and the filing says so: it 'has a minority market share in the global smartphone, personal computer, tablet and wearables markets,' while competitors have 'broad product lines, low-priced products, large installed bases of active devices, and large customer bases.' On the AI axis that defines this graph, Apple is following rather than leading -- it now licenses a rival's frontier models to power Siri (see the Apple Intelligence / Siri row and its citation) while pushing its own advantage down into silicon. |
| Pricing power | weak The 20-F states the industry has "a general trend toward declining prices for products and services of a given technology over time" and that ASEH's own "average selling prices of our packaging and testing services have experienced sharp declines" under "intense price competition". FY2025 consolidated gross margin was 17.7% (up from 16.3%), and management attributes the gain to "higher packaging and testing revenue mix and higher factory utilization" rather than price; the EMS half earned a 9.2% gross margin on raw-material costs equal to 78.7% of EMS revenue, and the five largest customers supplied 46.5% of 2025 operating revenues. | moderate It holds price rather than raising it. On the figures filed with the FY2026 10-K, gross margin was 70.7% of revenue in FY2024 ($4,433M on $6,268M), 70.2% in FY2025 ($4,613M on $6,572M) and 70.7% in FY2026 ($4,899M on $6,925M) - flat across three years in which revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M - and it held that level while absorbing a component-cost shock. It is no stronger than that because the filing's own risk factor lists "competitive pricing, customer price sensitivity" and "pricing and discounting pressures" among the drivers of gross margin, and discloses that the company "experienced inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins" - a cost shock it is absorbing rather than fully passing on. | strong The 10-K's own gross-margin table: total gross margin percentage 44.1% (2023) to 46.2% (2024) to 46.9% (2025), with Services at 75.4% versus Products at 36.8%, and iPhone net sales rising 'due to higher net sales of Pro models' -- mix moving up, not down. Held against the filing's own hedge that 'gross margins will be subject to volatility and downward pressure,' the realised trend is the stronger evidence. |
| Summary | ASEH sells turnkey assembly and test at a scale most captive IDM lines cannot match: the 20-F says it is "involved in all stages of the semiconductor manufacturing process except circuit design and wafer fabrication", and leans on Taiwan, "currently the largest center for outsourced semiconductor manufacturing in the world", plus a "strategic alliance with TSMC", to sit next to the foundries its customers already use. The durable part is cost position from utilization, not customer capture — the filing concedes customers multi-source and that foundries are moving into advanced packaging from above. | NetApp sells storage hardware but the asset is ONTAP, the data-management software that has run its arrays for over three decades and now also runs inside the three largest public clouds as a first-party service. The FY2026 10-K organises the company into two segments, Hybrid Cloud (AFF and ASA all-flash arrays, AFX for AI workloads, FAS hybrid-flash, E/EF-Series, StorageGRID object storage) and Public Cloud (Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Cloud Volumes ONTAP), and states that both rest on the same ONTAP software. That is the whole argument: an enterprise that has standardised its snapshots, replication and multiprotocol access on ONTAP carries those habits with it when it moves workloads to a hyperscaler, and NetApp is paid on both sides of the move. The evidence that the lock has commercial value is the margin's steadiness: across the three years the FY2026 10-K reports, gross margin sat at 70.7%, 70.2% and 70.7% of revenue ($4,433M on $6,268M, $4,613M on $6,572M, $4,899M on $6,925M) while revenue grew, and the filing's own percentage-of-revenue table shows no mix shift doing that work - product and services held near 46% and 54% of revenue throughout. The limits are equally in the filing. NetApp is second, not first: IDC's 1Q26 tracker puts it behind Dell in external enterprise storage, and the 10-K's competition section concedes that cloud providers are simultaneously partners and rivals, that consumption models "may reduce overall demand for our traditional on-premises offerings sold through a capital expenditure (capex) model", and that alternative architectures "may reduce or eliminate demand for some of our offerings". Component exposure is real too: the filing discloses "inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins", and names NAND among the components whose supply can tighten. This is a durable second place built on software stickiness, not a structural monopoly. | Apple's moat is usually asserted through the ecosystem; the FY2025 10-K neither quantifies nor claims retention, so the evidence has to be read elsewhere in the filing. Where it does show is mix and margin: Services reached $109.2B of $416.2B net sales (+14%) at a 75.4% gross margin against 36.8% on Products, so 26% of revenue delivered $82.3B of the $195.2B total gross margin, and iPhone grew 'due to higher net sales of Pro models.' That profit concentration is also the vulnerability the filing itself flags: Apple 'earns revenue from licensing arrangements with Google LLC and other companies to offer their search services on the Company's platforms,' arrangements 'currently subject to government investigations and legal proceedings' after Google was found to have violated U.S. antitrust laws on August 5, 2024 and the D.C. District Court ordered remedies on September 2, 2025 -- with the 10-K warning that a reversal on appeal could impose DOJ's proposed remedies 'prohibiting Google from offering the Company commercial terms for search distribution,' which 'could materially adversely affect the Company's ability to earn revenue from such licensing arrangements.' Apple never discloses the size of that payment in the filing -- the concentration is admitted but not measured. Alongside it, the App Store toll has already been reduced in both jurisdictions. What is not in dispute is the vertical integration: Apple designs the silicon and now the cellular modem, and uses 'custom components available from only one source.' Read together: a genuine, margin-visible switching-cost moat around an integrated stack, with its two most profitable layers under active legal reduction. |
| Chain position | Back-end contractor to the AI silicon chain: the 20-F ties its FOCoS, FOCoS-Bridge and 2.5D/3D lines to "ASICs and HBM for HPC, networking, server and AI/ML applications" and "AI accelerators for AI training", and warns that a slowdown in AI demand would leave "lower utilization rates for our specialized equipment". | NetApp sits between the memory supply and the enterprise data centre. Upstream, the FY2026 10-K says "Third-party component costs make up a significant portion of our product costs" and singles out NAND as hard to manage "if supplies of certain components, including NAND, become limited relative to demand". Downstream, the hyperscalers are channel, partner and rival at once: the filing states "We both partner with and compete against cloud service providers through our cloud-based software and services offerings", while Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes are delivered as those clouds' own natively embedded services. Distribution is a mix of direct sales and "an ecosystem of partners, including the leading cloud providers". | Applications-layer name in the AI chain: the 10-K describes designing 'nearly the entire solution' and using custom components 'available from only one source,' making Apple a large, concentrated buyer of leading-edge silicon rather than a supplier of AI compute to anyone else. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.05 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.11 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. |