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.
| Cloudflare | The Walt Disney Company | Lam Research | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | wide The band is earned by a measured share gap on a hard-to-rebuild asset, not asserted. W3Techs' 17 September 2026 survey (w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy) puts Cloudflare in front of 25.8% of all websites, an 85.0% share of the reverse-proxy market, against Amazon CloudFront at 5.5%, Fastly at 3.0% and Akamai at 2.1% - roughly fifteen times the nearest rival. The FY2025 10-K filed 2026-02-26 describes what a challenger would have to reproduce to contest that: a network that 'spans more than 330 cities in over 125 countries worldwide and interconnects with over 13,000 networks globally', architected to 'run every service on every server in every city' - capacity and peering accumulated city by city over a decade, not bought in a quarter. The position has been monetised without margin decay: SEC XBRL fundamentals on this site show GAAP gross margin inside a 74.5-78.7% band in every fiscal year from FY2017 to FY2025 while revenue grew from $134.9M to $2,167.9M, and Cloudflare's Q4/FY2025 results release of 2026-02-10 (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) reports remaining performance obligations up 48% and new annual contract value up nearly 50% year over year. What stops this being a certainty rather than a judgement: the dominant share sits in application services, while SASE and developer compute are contested by vendors the 10-K itself concedes hold 'substantially greater financial, technical, and other resources.' | wide FY2025 10-K: a content library spanning approximately 100 years of production history — roughly 5,300 live-action film titles, 460 animated film titles plus deep episodic series holdings — feeds every segment (streaming, parks, consumer products, theatrical), and the physical parks portfolio (Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Hong Kong Disneyland 48%, Shanghai Disney Resort 43%, Disney Cruise Line) is not replicable at comparable scale (sec.gov dis-20250927.htm, FY ended 2025-09-27). | wide The FY2026 10-K competition section describes tool-level qualification lock-in as the structural fact of the industry: 'semiconductor manufacturers must make a substantial investment to qualify and integrate new capital equipment into semiconductor production lines. As a result, once a semiconductor manufacturer has selected a particular supplier's equipment and qualified it for production, the manufacturer generally maintains that selection for that specific production application and technology node as long as the supplier's products demonstrate performance to specification in the installed base.' The filing then sizes what that incumbency is worth: of 23,232,690 thousand dollars of FY2026 revenue, 8,347,202 thousand - about 36% - was customer-support-related revenue and other, which the same document defines as 'sales of customer services, spares, upgrades, and non-leading-edge equipment' sold back into the installed base. A qualified position plus a third of revenue annuitised against it is a durable barrier rather than a cyclical one. |
| Moat type | cost scale The FY2025 10-K states the mechanism outright, and it is a unit-cost curve rather than a user-to-user network: 'We have chosen to utilize this idle capacity to create a free tier of service which has generated substantial global scale for us. In turn, this scale makes us attractive partners for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) globally, which reduces our co-location and bandwidth costs. As our network grows, these dynamics become even more powerful.' The same section explains why the curve applies to every line rather than one: the architecture lets Cloudflare 'deploy standard, commodity hardware' and run 'every service on every server in every city', so a new product reaches 330+ cities at near-zero incremental capital. That is what lets the filing claim Workers is offered 'at prices that are highly competitive with public cloud vendors' while FY2025 GAAP gross margin still printed 74.5%. Switching costs (traffic routed through Cloudflare, DNS delegated to it) and threat-intelligence feedback from aggregate traffic sit on top, but the filing-stated primary source is cost falling as the network grows. | intangibles ip The moat is franchise IP and brands: the FY2025 10-K lists Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic as the top-level pillars of Disney+, and Mickey and Friends, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Disney Princess, Frozen, Avengers and Toy Story among the major licensed properties; the same IP is monetized across theatrical, streaming, parks and licensing windows (sec.gov dis-20250927.htm). | switching costs The 10-K grounds the advantage in the cost of requalification, not in scale or patents: a customer that has qualified a competitor's tool is hard to win, and conversely Lam's own qualified positions persist for that application and node. The same section adds that the company must keep serving 'our installed base of customers through the delivery of high-quality and cost-efficient spare parts', naming the installed base as the asset being defended. |
| Leadership | clear leader Leadership is measured, not inferred. W3Techs on 2026-09-17 records an 85.0% reverse-proxy market share against 5.5% for Amazon CloudFront and 2.1% for Akamai, and makes Cloudflare the largest authoritative-DNS provider at 18.5% of all websites versus 9.9% for the next-placed GoDaddy Group. The FY2025 10-K reports the enterprise side moving the same way - 4,298 large customers at 2025 year-end against 3,497 a year earlier and 2,756 in 2023 - and the Q4/FY2025 results release (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) cites the largest annual contract value deal in company history at about $42.5M per year. The band is for the application-services core the share data covers; in SASE and in serverless compute Cloudflare is a challenger to larger incumbents, and no independent placement naming Cloudflare in those markets was obtained for this profile. | co leader Clear leader in its two profit engines — TEA's 2024 Theme Index ranks Disney Experiences the top park operator worldwide with Magic Kingdom #1 for 19 straight years (laughingplace.com, 2025-10-24), and the studio topped the 2025 global box office at $6.58B (Screen Daily, 2026-01-04) — but in total video Disney is second: Nielsen's April 2026 Media Distributor Gauge puts Disney at 10.3% of US TV viewing vs YouTube's 13.4% (MediaPost, 2026-06-25). Co-leader is the honest company-level band. | co leader The 10-K claims position but not primacy: 'We believe we are in a strong position with our leadership and expertise in deposition, etch, and clean markets.' The same document names Applied Materials as primary competitor in deposition and Applied Materials, Hitachi and Tokyo Electron as primary competitors in etch, which is a shared-leadership structure rather than a clear single leader. |
| Pricing power | moderate Evidence cuts both ways, which is why this is not the top band. For it: GAAP gross margin has never left a 74.5-78.7% band across FY2017-FY2025 (SEC XBRL fundamentals on this site) even as revenue compounded 16x, and the Q4/FY2025 results release (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) shows customers committing more rather than less - RPO +48% year over year and new ACV up nearly 50%. Against it: FY2025's 74.5% is the lowest reading in that nine-year series, a large permanent free tier anchors the entry price, the 10-K positions Workers 'at prices that are highly competitive with public cloud vendors', and the competition risk factor warns that larger rivals can 'sell products and services with which we compete at zero or negative margins, offer fee waivers and reductions or other economic and non-economic concessions', with competitive pressure that 'may result in price reductions, fewer subscriptions, reduced revenue and gross margin'. | strong Q3 FY26 (quarter ended June 2026, reported 2026-08-05): domestic Parks & Experiences operating income rose 27% on 11% revenue growth, and streaming operating margin expanded from 6.6% to 12.9% on 11% subscription revenue growth — margin expansion well ahead of volume in both engines (thedesk.net earnings summary). Counterweight: the FY2025 10-K notes MVPD consolidation may pressure linear carriage terms, so pricing power is concentrated in parks and DTC, not linear. | moderate Real but bounded, and the filing is explicit that the recent gain was mix rather than price. Gross margin as a percent of total revenue rose 180 basis points to 50.5% in fiscal 2026 from 48.7% in fiscal 2025 (gross margin of 11,725,308 thousand dollars on revenue of 23,232,690 thousand, against 8,979,059 on 18,435,591; 7,052,791 on 14,905,386 in fiscal 2024), and the MD&A attributes that: 'Gross margin as a percentage of revenue increased in fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal year 2025 largely due to favorable customer mix, partially offset by aluminum and steel tariff-related spend.' Against it, the same filing says manufacturers evaluate suppliers on 'overall cost of ownership', that the spares business competes with third-party spare parts providers, and that the customer list is a handful of very large buyers (Micron, Samsung, SK hynix and TSMC named as the most significant customers). |
| Summary | Cloudflare sells security, performance and connectivity as services delivered from one global anycast network rather than from boxes at a customer's edge. The FY2025 10-K frames the market as a consolidation away from enterprises that 'string together a diverse set of on-premises hardware boxes from different vendors' and away from 'stringing together multiple point-cloud solutions that only address specific network needs', toward one integrated provider it calls the Connectivity Cloud, and places Cloudflare as 'a leader in this Connectivity Cloud category'. The economics are unusual: idle capacity funds a free tier, the free tier buys global traffic scale, that scale makes Cloudflare a peering partner ISPs want, and peering cuts colocation and bandwidth cost - a loop the filing says 'become[s] even more powerful' as the network grows. Independent measurement confirms where that loop has already settled the market: W3Techs on 2026-09-17 shows an 85.0% reverse-proxy share and the largest authoritative-DNS footprint at 18.5% of all websites. Commercially the company ended 2025 with roughly 332,000 paying customers in more than 190 countries and 4,298 large customers, up from 2,756 two years earlier, with no customer above 10% of revenue. The contested half of the story is the growth half: the SASE platform competes with established cloud-security, email-security and SD-WAN vendors, and the developer platform competes for storage and compute against hyperscalers, markets where the 10-K's own risk factors concede rivals have greater name recognition, larger customer bases and 'more mature products and services developed for large customers'. The core is defended; the adjacencies are being fought for, and FY2025 gross margin at a nine-year low of 74.5% is the first visible cost of building GPU capacity for that fight. | Disney's moat is a century of franchise IP monetized through mutually reinforcing windows that competitors cannot assemble: the FY2025 10-K describes a library of ~5,300 live-action and 460 animated film titles built over approximately 100 years, distributed through streaming (Disney+ ~132M and Hulu ~64M paid subscribers as of 2025-09-27), linear networks, theatrical release and physical parks. The parks flywheel is the clearest expression: TEA's 2024 Theme Index (published 2025-10-24) again ranked Disney Experiences the top theme park operator worldwide, with Magic Kingdom the most-visited park for the 19th straight year. The studio led the 2025 global box office with $6.58B — its ninth #1 finish in a decade — driven by its own franchises (Zootopia 2 $1.48B, Lilo & Stitch $1.04B, Avatar: Fire and Ash) per Screen Daily (2026-01-04). The challenged edges are real: in Nielsen's Media Distributor Gauge for April 2026 Disney held 10.3% of total US TV viewing — second to YouTube's 13.4%, ahead of Netflix's 7.8% — and the 10-K flags MVPD consolidation pressure on linear carriage terms. But the Q3 FY26 report (2026-08-05) showed the model inflecting: revenue +7% to $25.25B, Experiences revenue +10% to $9.97B with domestic parks operating income +27%, and streaming operating margin expanding from 6.6% to 12.9% year over year. | Lam sells etch, deposition and clean tools into a per-node, per-application qualification process that its own 10-K says customers generally do not revisit once a supplier is qualified. The result is two linked economics, and the FY2026 filing splits them: systems revenue of 14,885,488 thousand dollars and customer-support-related revenue and other of 8,347,202 thousand, on total revenue of 23,232,690 thousand. The second line is the installed-base annuity - services, spares, upgrades and refurbished Reliant tools sold wherever Lam already holds the process step. The 10-K names Applied Materials as the primary competitor in dielectric and metals deposition, ASM International and Wonik IPS in ALD/PECVD, and Applied Materials, Hitachi and Tokyo Electron in etch, so this is shared rather than sole leadership. The live erosion risk is policy, not a rival product: China was 34% of revenue in both fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2025 (7,859,811 thousand dollars in FY2026, the largest single region), and the filing states that U.S. export controls on sales to customers in China, including entity listings of multiple customers, restrict sales of equipment and spare parts by U.S. suppliers and thereby 'provides an advantage to our international competitors that are not subject to these restrictions'. |
| Chain position | Cloudflare sits between end users and whatever hosts the application - origin data centre, public cloud or SaaS - so it is a control layer in front of infrastructure rather than infrastructure a workload runs on, which the 10-K argues is the point: customers 'concerned about being locked in to any one public cloud provider' want policy enforced by 'an independent and integrated services provider'. Two AI-era roles follow from that position. As a supplier, the filing describes 'ongoing deployment of graphics processing units (GPUs) across our global network of servers' behind Workers AI, Vectorize and AI Gateway, putting inference next to the user instead of in a region. As a gatekeeper, the application-services suite now exists in part to 'easily identify, block and control access from AI crawlers and AI agents and operators' and underpins announced efforts to let content creators monetise how those crawlers reach their work - which makes Cloudflare a toll point between AI model builders and the open web. | Content/IP owner at the top of the entertainment value chain: produces and owns franchise IP (Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, 80%-owned ESPN), distributes it through owned channels (parks, Disney+, Hulu, ESPN DTC, ABC, theatrical), licenses it downstream to consumer-products makers and retailers, and is a major upstream buyer of sports rights (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football) — including the pending NFL Transaction exchanging a 10% ESPN stake for NFL Network assets (FY2025 10-K, sec.gov dis-20250927.htm). | Upstream wafer-fabrication-equipment supplier; the 10-K names Micron, Samsung, SK hynix and TSMC as its most significant customers across FY2024-FY2026, so Lam sits one step above the memory and foundry capacity that AI compute depends on. |
| Products (share / barrier) |
|
|
|
| Long-horizon vote | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.35 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.30 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |