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.
| Credo Technology | NetApp | The Walt Disney Company | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow The 10-K names Broadcom, Marvell and Astera Labs as principal competitors that compete on 'some, but not all' of Credo's solutions, and discloses that the top 10 customers were approximately 90% of fiscal 2026 revenue with two customers at 10% or more each. A defensible technical position sold into a handful of buyers with that much leverage is narrow, not wide. | 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. | 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). |
| Moat type | intangibles ip The filing states the products 'are based on our own optimized Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) technologies' and lists 'extent of IP protection and enforcement of rights' among the principal competitive factors in its market. | 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. | 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). |
| Leadership | co leader The 10-K states 'We believe we are the only company in our industry offering a complete suite of high-performance connectivity solutions', while naming Broadcom, Marvell and Astera as principal competitors on parts of the portfolio — a co-leader's claim, attributed to the company, not an independently observed share. | 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". | 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. |
| Pricing power | moderate The n-1 node advantage the filing describes lets Credo price against competitors from a lower cost base, but the same filing discloses two customers at 10% or more of revenue and a top-10 concentration near 90%, which is buyer leverage working the other way. | 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 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. |
| Summary | Credo's durable asset is its own SerDes and DSP silicon, which the 10-K says reaches 'similar performance to leading competitors' products but at a lower cost and more highly available legacy node (n-1 advantage)'. That cost-and-supply edge, plus a portfolio the company believes is the industry's only complete high-performance connectivity suite, is what holds a position against far larger rivals — and it is held with roughly 90% of revenue coming from ten customers. | 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. | 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. |
| Chain position | Upstream interconnect supplier: SerDes/DSP silicon and active cables sitting between accelerators, switches and optics inside AI data centers. | 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". | 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). |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.35 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |