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.
| Dell Technologies | KLA Corporation | MongoDB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow The FY2026 10-K describes advantages that are real but shallow, and a revenue mix that is diluting them. It names them as 'our end-to-end solutions portfolio, go-to-market capabilities, supply chain, and global services' and calls the direct sales channel 'a significant competitive advantage', while conceding it faces 'ongoing product and price competition in all areas of our business from both branded and generic competitors' and, on components, that 'any disruption that may occur because of our dependence on single- or limited-source vendors would not disproportionately disadvantage us relative to our competitors' - i.e. no differentiated supply position. The filing's own margin table shows where the franchise actually earns: total gross margin fell from 23.8% of net revenue in Fiscal 2024 to 22.2% in Fiscal 2025 to 20.0% in Fiscal 2026, and inside that, product gross margin fell 17.5% to 15.8% to 13.7% while services gross margin rose 40.8% to 41.4% to 44.8%. Narrow rather than none, because the high-margin services and storage core is intact and its margin rate improved; narrow rather than wide, because the line that is growing carries a 13.7% product gross margin and the filing attributes the whole decline to it. | wide The fiscal 2026 10-K states 'The strength of our competitive positions in many of our existing markets is primarily due to our leading technology', and frames process control as 'an essential enabler' of the yield ramp in fabs the filing says now cost 'well above $10 billion'. | narrow The FY2026 10-K frames a 'rapidly evolving and highly competitive' database market where the principal rivals — 'legacy database providers and large cloud providers' — hold explicit advantages: 'longer operating histories, more established relationships … significantly greater financial, technical, marketing or other resources … broader global distribution,' and can offer competing products 'at a low cost or no cost.' A developer-mindshare and switching-cost position is defensible but not wide against that field. |
| Moat type | cost scale The filing locates the advantage in scale of distribution and supply, not in proprietary rights. It states 'Our world-class supply chain operates at significant scale', describes a direct sales force plus a partner network that produced 'approximately 40% of our net revenue' in Fiscal 2026, and lists supply chain and global services among its competitive advantages. The IP alternative is ruled out in the same document: with 25,859 granted patents held at January 30, 2026, Dell still says 'we are not substantially dependent on any single patent or group of related patents.' | intangibles ip The 10-K reports over 9,100 active patents and over 3,600 pending applications with terms running through 2045, alongside proprietary process-control software (Klarity, I-PAT, aiSIGHT) that turns inspection and metrology data into yield learning. | switching costs A database is the system an application is built on: the 10-K states 'a database directly impacts an application's performance, scalability, flexibility and reliability,' and Atlas is 'our managed multi-cloud database-as-a-service' running the customer's live workloads — re-platforming a database is a rewrite, not a swap. |
| Leadership | co leader The 10-K's only positioning claim is the unquantified 'Dell Technologies is a leader in the global technology industry'; it names no competitor and gives no share anywhere. The band therefore rests on disclosed absolute scale - ISG net revenue of 60,826m and CSG net revenue of 50,984m in Fiscal 2026, operations in over 170 countries - set against the filing's own admission that hyperscale Infrastructure-as-a-Service buyers 'often buy their infrastructure directly from original design manufacturers', which caps how much of the market Dell can lead at all. | clear leader The 10-K opens by describing KLA as a supplier of 'industry-leading equipment and services' and attributes its competitive positions 'in many of our existing markets' primarily to leading technology; named competitors are Applied Materials, ASML, Hitachi High-Tech, Lasertec and Onto Innovation. | co leader The 10-K positions MongoDB as the leading document database by developer mindshare but names 'legacy database providers and large cloud providers' as better-resourced rivals across the broader database market — a category leader within a market it does not lead overall. |
| Pricing power | weak The filing describes price-taking and its own tables confirm it. It reports 'ongoing product and price competition in all areas of our business from both branded and generic competitors' and says 'We closely monitor market pricing, including the effect of foreign exchange rate movements, in an effort to provide the best value for our customers.' Total gross margin fell from 23.8% of net revenue in Fiscal 2024 to 22.2% in Fiscal 2025 to 20.0% in Fiscal 2026, with product gross margin down to 13.7%; CSG operating margin fell three straight years (7.6%, 6.1%, 5.6% of segment revenue); and non-GAAP operating income as a percentage of net revenue 'decreased 10 basis points to 8.8%' even as revenue grew 19%. Consolidated operating margin did rise 70 basis points to 7.2%, but the filing credits a lower operating expense rate for that, not price. | strong Services were approximately 23% of fiscal 2026 total revenues on an installed base that recurs, backlog nearly doubled to $12.57 billion, and SEC-reported net income was 35.6% of revenue in fiscal 2026 with operating income at 41.2% of revenue in fiscal 2025. | moderate Owning the IP and the roadmap ('the determination of which features are included in our free or paid offerings') gives real list-price control, but the same filing flags competitors offering database products 'at a low cost or no cost basis,' which caps it. |
| Summary | The AI-server line is enormous and it is not a moat - the FY2026 10-K says so in its own margin bridge. AI-optimized servers net revenue went 1,873m in Fiscal 2024 to 9,286m in Fiscal 2025 to 24,683m in Fiscal 2026 (+396% then +166%), lifting total ISG revenue to 60,826m (+40%). Over the same year ISG operating income as a percentage of segment revenue fell 110 basis points to 11.7% 'due to a decline in gross margin rate that outpaced the decline in operating expense rate. Gross margin rate decreased primarily as the result of a shift in mix towards our AI-optimized servers offerings', and the Fiscal 2027 outlook repeats the expectation of 'margin rate pressure resulting from a continuing shift in mix towards our AI-optimized servers offerings'. The cleanest test of pass-through is the filing's product-versus-services split: product net revenue grew 27% to 90,405m at a 13.7% gross margin (down from 15.8% and 17.5%), while services net revenue fell 4% to 23,133m at a 44.8% gross margin. The AI boom arrived entirely as thin product revenue and did not pull the profitable services book along with it. What Dell adds is described plainly as integration: it uses contract manufacturers, buys components from suppliers and 'subsequently sell[s] those components to the manufacturer', and its own 'manufacturing process consists of assembly, software installation, functional testing, and quality control'. The bypass is named too: 'We also face competition from non-traditional IT companies, including large Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers, that often buy their infrastructure directly from original design manufacturers. Competitive pressures could increase if customers choose to move existing workloads to these providers.' What survives as a moat is the part an ODM cannot sell an enterprise: a direct sales force and account teams, a global service and support footprint whose gross margin rate is still rising, storage that held revenue within 3% of flat through the whole mix shift, and Dell Payment Solutions financing that produces multiyear recurring arrangements. | KLA sells the inspection, metrology and yield-management layer a fab must run to reach volume production: the 10-K says accelerating the yield ramp ahead of competitors is critical to chipmakers' profitability, and backlog nearly doubled from $7.86 billion to $12.57 billion in the year to June 30, 2026 'due to strong demand driven by the AI infrastructure buildout'. | MongoDB monetizes developer mindshare that began as open source: the 10-K notes 'we own the intellectual property of our offerings since we are the creators of the software,' which lets it run a 'proprietary software subscription business model' and control the roadmap. The durable asset is the document-model install base and Atlas's managed multi-cloud workloads, positioned for AI as 'the underlying database … capable of processing queries against rich and complex data structures.' The counterweight, in the filing's own words, is that the large cloud providers it depends on for Atlas hosting are also its best-resourced competitors. |
| Chain position | Integrator between accelerator and component suppliers and enterprise or sovereign buyers: the 10-K says Dell purchases components from suppliers, sells them on to contract manufacturers, and performs 'assembly, software installation, functional testing, and quality control', then reaches customers through a direct sales force and a partner network that generated about 40% of Fiscal 2026 net revenue. | Sits beside the process steps rather than in them — it measures and inspects what deposition, etch and lithography produce, and TSMC alone exceeded 10% of revenue in each of the last three fiscal years. | Layer-10 application-layer data platform — the operational database under AI and general software workloads. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.05 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.42 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |