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 | Intel | Tokyo Electron | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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.' | eroding The FY2025 10-K (filed 2026-01-23) repeats the concession, now broadened: 'we have lost market share in recent years, including in both client and data center markets, in the market for x86-based semiconductor products, and more generally in the markets for semiconductor compute products, as competitors have introduced highly competitive data center and client platform products.' It adds that the data-center business 'has been further negatively impacted in the past few years by the significant shift of customer spend toward GPUs optimized for AI workloads' — a historically wide moat still actively eroding. | narrow Integrated Report 2026 (issued 2026-09-15) documents strong positions across the line: by Tokyo Electron's own estimate it ranks No. 1 in diffusion furnaces, batch deposition, metal deposition, coater/developers, gas chemical etch and wafer probers, No. 2 in plasma etch and bonders and No. 3 in cleaning, and holds a "100% share" of coater/developers for EUV lithography; its installed base, industry-leading by its own estimate, is approximately 100,000 units, growing by approximately 4,000-6,000 units a year; and its 26,592 patents rank No. 1 in the semiconductor production equipment industry on the LexisNexis PatentSight+ database. Reported returns stayed high through a sales decline: gross profit margin stayed between 44.6% and 47.1% and ROE between 21.8% and 37.2% across fiscal 2022-2026, including fiscal 2024 when net sales fell to ¥1,830.5 billion. The share ranks, the EUV share and the installed-base lead are company estimates, not third-party data. |
| 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 durable assets remain the x86 architecture and process-technology IP: the FY2025 10-K claims 'We are a global leader in the design and manufacturing of CPUs and other semiconductor products' and stakes the recovery on process IP — 'Intel 18A introduces two industry firsts in high-volume semiconductor manufacturing: gate-all-around transistors (RibbonFET) and backside power delivery (PowerVia).' | intangibles ip The report calls its patent portfolio its "fifth strength" and says that "by supporting our other four strengths, it serves a vital role as the foundation" for medium- to long-term corporate value: 26,592 patents as of March 31, 2026, 1,415 inventions created in Japan and 345 overseas in 2025, and Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators recognition for the fifth consecutive year. The other strengths rest on the same proprietary process know-how — co-created technology roadmaps that evaluate technologies "for the next four generations and beyond" with customers, "numerous development PORs" (process of record) in the frontend business, and the EUV coater/developer position — so proprietary process technology, reinforced by qualification in customers' process flows, is the moat source. |
| 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. | fast follower The FY2025 10-K still opens 'We are a global leader in the design and manufacturing of CPUs', yet concedes lost share 'in both client and data center markets' and a spend shift 'toward GPUs optimized for AI workloads' where Intel participates via 'Xeon, AI PCs, Arc GPUs and our open software stack' plus 'inference-optimized GPUs on a targeted annual cadence' — following the AI compute market rather than setting its pace. | co leader The CEO's message describes Tokyo Electron as "one of the world's leading suppliers of semiconductor production equipment" and states a "goal of becoming number one globally" — it does not claim to be the largest supplier overall — while by its own estimate it ranks No. 1 in six charted segments (diffusion furnace, batch deposition, metal deposition, coater/developer, gas chemical etch, wafer prober), No. 2 in plasma etch and bonders, and No. 3 in cleaning. |
| 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'. | weak The FY2025 10-K states the mechanism itself: higher-priced products 'have lower margins as they are produced at external foundries rather than in our manufacturing facilities. To the extent demand shifts from our higher-margin to lower-margin products in any of our market segments, our gross margin percentage has decreased and may decrease again' — plus $878 million of 2025 inventory reserves on the early Intel 18A ramp. | moderate Gross profit margin held in a 44.6%-47.1% range over fiscal 2022-2026, including fiscal 2024's sales decline, but in fiscal 2026 it fell 1.8 points to 45.3% "due to factors such as higher raw material prices and increased labor costs" even as net sales reached a record, and the CEO lists "revising prices appropriately with respect to cost increases caused by inflation" among five initiatives needed to improve the operating margin. |
| 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. | Still the incumbent x86 CPU designer-manufacturer — FY2025 revenue was $52.9 billion, roughly flat — but the filing concedes lost share in client and data center and an AI-driven customer shift toward GPUs; the counter-thesis is process IP, with Intel 18A shipping in Core Ultra Series 3 ('the first products to be manufactured using our new Intel 18A process technology') and Intel 14A 'designed from inception as an offering to external customers.' | Tokyo Electron makes wafer fab equipment for what its Integrated Report 2026 calls the "four key processes necessary for semiconductor scaling: deposition, coater/developer, etch, and cleaning", plus wafer probers and bonders for test and advanced packaging. The report grounds its edge in breadth and incumbency: leading share estimates in most of its segments, an estimated 100% share of EUV coater/developers, an installed base of approximately 100,000 units, industry-leading by its own estimate, feeding a Field Solutions business that sold ¥626.0 billion of parts, services, used equipment and modifications in fiscal 2026, and the industry's largest patent portfolio. Fiscal 2026 net sales were a record ¥2,443,533 million, but gross profit margin fell 1.8 points to 45.3% on higher raw material prices and labor costs, and operating margin fell 3.1 points to 25.6% as R&D expenses rose 11.1% to ¥277,866 million. China accounted for 34.1% of fiscal 2026 net sales, down from 41.7% the year before. |
| 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. | x86 compute incumbent and would-be US leading-edge foundry; its 18A/14A ramp is the main Western alternative to TSMC at the leading edge. | Upstream equipment supplier to chipmakers: fiscal 2026 new-equipment sales of ¥1,775.4 billion went 59% to non-memory (logic, foundry, others), 31% to DRAM and 10% to NAND; by region, China took 34.1%, South Korea 22.3% and Taiwan 20.4% of net sales. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.24 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. |