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 | JCET Group | |
|---|---|---|
| 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.' | none JCET has scale but not excess returns. TrendForce's 2024 OSAT ranking (2025-05-13) puts it third with '$5B in revenue (+19.3% YoY)', behind ASE at $18.54B ('nearly a 45% share among the top ten') and Amkor at $6.32B. JCET's 2025 annual report, citing ChipInsights, says it stayed third globally and first in mainland China, with the top three OSATs holding more than 52% combined. That scale has not lifted returns. The same report gives weighted average ROE of 5.81% in 2023, 6.00% in 2024 and 5.56% in 2025, or 4.86% in 2025 excluding non-recurring items. Main-business gross margin was 13.95% in 2025, up 1.07 percentage points. Net profit attributable to shareholders fell 2.75% to RMB 1.565 billion on revenue of RMB 38.87 billion. ROE for the first half of 2026 was 2.92%. |
| 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. | none None of the usual moat sources holds up in the cited evidence. Cost scale: JCET ranks third, but its ROE has stayed between 5.56% and 6.00% for three years, and TrendForce's 2024 ranking puts ASE at $18.54B against JCET's $5B. IP: the annual report lists 3,123 patents, 2,601 of them invention patents. The same report's 2026 plan says that in high-end advanced packaging the company will 'accelerate catching up' in customer binding, technology R&D and capacity. Its high-end advanced packaging plant, JCET Microelectronics, posted a net loss in 2025 while ramping. Switching costs: the top five customers took 48.80% of 2025 sales. Amkor's FY2025 10-K names JCET Group with ASE Technology and Powertech as established Asian competitors and says IDM customers weigh outsourcing against 'their own in-house capabilities'. JCET's 1H26 report adds that foundries and IDMs are speeding up their own advanced packaging. Policy also limits the high end. TrendForce (2025-02-14, citing Commercial Times) reports that with Chinese OSAT firms excluded from the U.S. PW list, 'high-end chip packaging is blocked in China', pushing those orders to Taiwanese OSATs. |
| 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 TrendForce's 2024 ranking has JCET third at $5B, against ASE's $18.54B and Amkor's $6.32B. The annual report, citing ChipInsights, keeps it third in 2025. JCET is in volume at the high end but describes itself as catching up there. Its 2025 report says the XDFOI chiplet process has entered mass production and the company made 'substantive progress' in 2.5D volume production, but its 2026 plan also says it will 'accelerate catching up' in high-end advanced packaging. TrendForce (2026-01-30) reports that JCET's XDFOI-based silicon-photonics engine completed customer sample deliveries and passed client-side validation, and that UMC is targeting CPO mass production in 2027. |
| 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 Main-business gross margin was 13.95% in 2025, up 1.07 percentage points, and materials made up 68.65% of packaging and test cost. The 2025 risk section says China's packaging industry 'has attracted many participants', and that rising competition may lower the industry's average unit prices and margins. The 1H26 report goes further: as new capacity comes on line, 'price competition in traditional packaging is especially prominent'. It also says the company improved its price-linkage mechanism and that gross margin 'continued to improve'. |
| 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. | JCET is mainland China's largest OSAT and the world's third-largest. It runs eight production bases in China, South Korea and Singapore and offers wafer-level, 2.5D/3D, system-in-package, flip-chip and wire-bond packaging, plus wafer probe and final test. Revenue in 2025 was RMB 38.87 billion, up 8.09%. By application, communications was 36.4%, consumer 23.6%, computing 21.3%, automotive 9.6% and industrial and medical 9.1%. Computing revenue grew 42.6% in 2025, then grew 40.4% in 1H26 to reach 30.1% of revenue. Volume is still mostly mainstream packaging: 38,880.05 million traditional units against 18,275.89 million advanced units in 2025. Most revenue comes from abroad. Overseas sales were RMB 30.44 billion of RMB 38.71 billion in main-business revenue, at a 12.20% gross margin against 20.40% on domestic sales. JCET is building in several directions: the XDFOI chiplet platform, a silicon-photonics engine for co-packaged optics that TrendForce (2026-01-30) says passed client-side validation, the JSAC automotive plant in Lingang, and the SDSS flash packaging plant, in which it bought 80% from Sandisk in September 2024. The 1H26 report shows revenue up 5.0% to RMB 19.53 billion, with net profit attributable up 79.4% to RMB 844.6 million. Even with that half-year gain, ROE was 2.92% for the half. The verdict is no moat: JCET is the scale leader among Chinese packagers, and its returns have stayed near 5% to 6% for three years while it catches up at the high end. |
| 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. | Back-end assembly and test contractor for chip designers, IDMs and foundries. In 2025, overseas sales were RMB 30.44 billion of RMB 38.71 billion in main-business revenue, and the five largest customers took 48.80% of sales. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |