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.
| MaxLinear | Iron Mountain | Johnson Controls International | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | none MaxLinear’s FY2025 10-K does not show a durable advantage. Its income statement reports revenue of $693,263 thousand in 2023, $360,528 thousand in 2024 and $467,641 thousand in 2025, with operating losses of $38,221 thousand, $223,352 thousand and $126,890 thousand. The risk factors say “Increased competition has resulted in price pressure, decreased demand, reduced revenue and profitability, and loss of market share”; the business section says competitors include “companies with much longer operating histories, greater name recognition, and substantially greater financial, technical and operational resources”; and because its products “often are building block semiconductors” it also faces integrated-circuit makers, “some of which may be existing customers or platform partners”. Two customers were 28% of 2025 net revenue and the ten largest 65%, and “substantially all of our sales to date have been made on a purchase order basis”. Gross profit held up - $385,663 thousand, $194,782 thousand and $265,814 thousand for 2023 to 2025 - and the AI optical ramp has lifted 2026 results, but a revenue base that nearly halved in one year and three straight years of operating losses do not evidence a moat. | narrow Iron Mountain's physical-records franchise shows a real switching-cost advantage, but the FY2025 Form 10-K also describes a slowly shrinking need for it, and the growth businesses compete in open markets. On the advantage side, an independent record: the Department of Justice complaint published in the Federal Register on 2016-04-11 (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/04/11/2016-08210/united-states-v-iron-mountain-inc-and-recall-holdings-ltd-proposed-final-judgment-and-competitive) stated that "Iron Mountain is the largest RMS company in the United States" and that "Taken together, permanent withdrawal fees and other withdrawal restrictions make it difficult for a new RMS entrant to win customers away from existing RMS vendors." The 2025 10-K reports more than 740 million cubic feet stored, says "we have consistently experienced strong customer retention levels", and shows the Global RIM segment's Adjusted EBITDA margin at 44.7% in 2025 against 44.6% in 2024. On the limiting side, Item 1A says "Our Records Management and Data Management service revenue growth is being negatively impacted by declining activity rates as stored records and tapes are becoming less active and more archival" and "A significant shift by our customers to storage of data through non-paper or non-tape-based technologies, whether now existing or developed in the future, could adversely affect our businesses." In data centres the 10-K says it competes with "numerous data center developers, owners and operators, many of whom own properties comparable to ours". A strong, regulator-documented lock-in on a physical market the company itself expects only to hold steady, plus growth arms without that lock-in, is a narrow moat rather than a wide one. | narrow Johnson Controls' FY2025 Form 10-K (fiscal year ended 30 September 2025, filed 2025-11-14) describes a real but bounded edge. On the advantage side it says "The Company's large base of current customers leads to significant repeat business for the maintenance, retrofit and replacement markets" and that it "is also able to leverage its installed base to generate sales for its service business"; Item 1A adds that its direct channel "creates a large installed base of our fire and security solutions and HVAC equipment, and creates opportunities for longer term service, monitoring, solutions and retrofit revenue over the lifecycle of the building." Stored fundamentals from the same 10-K show gross profit of $7,804 million on $22,331 million of revenue in fiscal 2023, $8,077 million on $22,952 million in fiscal 2024 and $8,592 million on $23,596 million in fiscal 2025. On the limiting side, the Competition section says the company works through contracts "either negotiated or awarded on a competitive basis", with price among the key award factors, names its larger competitors as Honeywell, Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Schneider Electric, Carrier Global, Trane Technologies, Vertiv, API Group and Daikin, and says it "competes in a highly fragmented building services market". Item 1A adds that backlog orders are a commodity-cost risk "as prices on such orders are typically fixed" and that reduced demand "may also erode average selling prices". An installed-base and service edge contested by several large peers is a narrow moat, not a wide one. |
| Moat type | none No single source of advantage in the 10-K is strong enough to name. MaxLinear has “over one thousand issued patents” and says consideration under intellectual property sale agreements “has previously been and is currently expected in the future be material”, but the same filing describes its products as building blocks that larger vendors can integrate, says some optical-interconnect customers are “module makers who are vertically integrated, where we compete with internally supplied components”, and claims only that “We believe that we compete favorably” on factors from product performance to price. Its RF-CMOS integration know-how is real, but nothing in the filing shows customers locked in or rivals unable to match it. | switching costs The advantage is the cost and friction of moving stored records. The 10-K's Item 1A says that "if we are successful in winning record storage customers from competitors, the process of moving their stored records into our facilities is often costly and time consuming", and its notes record payments made "to a customer in order to terminate the customer's storage of records with its current records management vendor" as customer inducements. The DOJ complaint (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/04/11/2016-08210/united-states-v-iron-mountain-inc-and-recall-holdings-ltd-proposed-final-judgment-and-competitive) describes the mechanism: "Customer contracts also often impose a cap on the number of boxes per month that a customer may permanently remove from a RMS vendor's facility, such that a switch to a new RMS vendor may take several months to complete", and a new vendor "will have to offer to pay the fees to induce the customer to switch". Scale helps, since the 10-K says "the majority of our competitors operate in only one market or region", but the filing's own account of what keeps customers is retention and the cost of leaving, which makes switching costs the primary source. | switching costs The 10-K places the advantage in the installed base and the service relationship that follows it, not in patents: it says "no single patent, or group of patents, is critical to the success of the business", while "The Company's large base of current customers leads to significant repeat business for the maintenance, retrofit and replacement markets." Item 1A says "Unlike many of our competitors, we rely on a direct sales channel for a substantial portion of our revenue", which installs HVAC equipment the company manufactures and "creates opportunities for longer term service, monitoring, solutions and retrofit revenue over the lifecycle of the building." Services were 32% of fiscal 2025 sales from continuing operations, and remaining performance obligations of $22.7 billion include large contracts for hospitals, schools and other governmental buildings with "average initial contract terms of 25 to 35 years". On the Q2 fiscal 2026 call (2026-05-06, https://s21.q4cdn.com/502874060/files/doc_earnings/2026/q2/transcript/Q2-2026-Transcript.pdf) the CEO described a service sales pilot that began in West Florida and said it "led to tripling service agreements immediately following new chiller startup commissioning." Equipment that stays in a building for its life and pulls service, controls and retrofit work behind it is a switching-cost source. |
| Leadership | fast follower In its fastest-growing line MaxLinear is a second source. Deep Fundamental’s September 27, 2024 deep dive (https://deepfundamental.substack.com/p/deep-dive-optical-module-market) says “Marvell ($MRVL) and Broadcom ($AVGO) are two major suppliers of DSPs, with Marvell holding the top position in the market”, that “Coherent also sources heavily from Marvell, with Broadcom/ Maxlinear potentially serving as second supplier with 20-30% share”, and that MaxLinear offers “DSPs at about half the price of Marvell's if it can achieve a meaningful mass production volume of at least 100K units per month”. Keystone has since reached volume - management said on the Q2 2026 call that it “continues to ramp into high volume production at major hyperscale customers across U.S. and Asia” - but the 10-K names Broadcom, Qualcomm, Realtek, Skyworks, Credo, MediaTek, Marvell, MACOM, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Renesas, Microchip and Semtech as primary merchant competitors, and no third-party source found ranks MaxLinear first in any of its markets. | clear leader The band applies to records management, the Global RIM segment that produced $5,291,481 thousand of 2025's $6,901,737 thousand revenue. Independent evidence: the DOJ complaint published in the Federal Register on 2016-04-11 (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/04/11/2016-08210/united-states-v-iron-mountain-inc-and-recall-holdings-ltd-proposed-final-judgment-and-competitive) stated "Iron Mountain is the largest RMS company in the United States", with fiscal 2014 worldwide revenues of "approximately $3.1 billion", and called Recall, with 2014 revenues of "approximately $836.1 million", "the second-largest RMS company in the United States"; the FY2025 10-K lists property "acquired in connection with our acquisition of Recall Holdings Limited". The 2025 10-K adds, in the company's own words, that "the majority of our competitors operate in only one market or region". The independent source is from 2016 and covers the United States only. Iron Mountain did go on to acquire Recall, but the proposed final judgment in the same notice required it to divest "Recall RMS assets in all fifteen geographic markets identified in the Complaint", thirteen of them to Access CIG, which the notice called "currently the third-largest RMS provider in the United States", so Recall's business was not absorbed whole. This leadership does not extend to data centres, where the Global Data Center segment's $803,429 thousand of 2025 revenue compares with total revenue of $9,217,000,000 at Equinix (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1101239/000110123926000032/0001101239-26-000032-index.htm) and $6,112,692,000 at Digital Realty (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1297996/000110465926015365/0001104659-26-015365-index.htm) in stored fundamentals from their FY2025 10-Ks. | fast follower The only independent evidence is dated and covers one end market: Omdia's data center cooling research on the 2023 market, as reported on 2024-06-19 (https://www.intelligentcio.com/north-america/2024/06/19/omdia-research-predicts-data-center-cooling-market-to-reach-16-87-billion-in-2028/), said "Vertiv, Johnson Controls and Stulz retained their top three positions – Vertiv notably gained 6% market share due to strong North American demand and cloud partnerships." Across buildings as a whole the leadership claims are the company's own: the 10-K calls it "a global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings" with "leading positions in attractive and growing end-markets across HVAC, controls, fire, security and services", and on the Q2 fiscal 2026 call the CEO said demand was "led by data centers where we're holding a leading position". The 10-K's Competition section names Honeywell, Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Schneider Electric, Carrier Global, Trane Technologies, Vertiv, API Group and Daikin as larger competitors. That ranking describes the 2023 market, covers data-centre cooling only, lists Vertiv first and records Vertiv gaining share; no newer independent ranking was found, and the wider leadership claims are the company's own, so the band is fast follower rather than co-leader. |
| Pricing power | moderate Mixed. Gross profit has stayed in proportion through the cycle - the 10-K’s income statement shows $265,814 thousand on revenue of $467,641 thousand in 2025 - and the Q2 2026 release (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001288469/000128846926000050/a06302026exhibit991.htm) reports GAAP gross margin of 57.8% against 56.5% a year earlier, guiding Q3 to 57.0%-60.0%. But the 10-K says “From time to time, we have reduced the average unit price of our products due to competitive pricing pressures, new product introductions by us or our competitors, and for other reasons, and we expect that we will have to do so again in the future”, that under some distributor agreements “we provide protection for reductions in selling prices of the distributors' inventory”, and in optical DSPs it entered as the lower-priced challenger. | strong In records, growth comes from price on steady volume. MD&A attributes Global RIM "organic storage rental revenue growth driven by revenue management" (organic storage rental growth of 5.4% in 2025), while Item 1A says volumes "were relatively steady in 2025" and "Our organic revenue growth has been positively impacted by our ability to effectively introduce, expand and monitor revenue management. If we are not able to continue and effectively manage pricing, our results of operations could be adversely affected". The segment's Adjusted EBITDA margin was 44.7% in 2025 against 44.6% in 2024. In data centres MD&A cites "improved pricing" and "a 620 basis point increase in Adjusted EBITDA Margin reflecting recent lease commencements, improved pricing and cost containment", to 51.8% from 45.6%. The limits: Item 1A says that on power costs "we may be limited in our ability to, or may not always choose to, pass these increased costs on to our customers", and the 2016 DOJ complaint (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/04/11/2016-08210/united-states-v-iron-mountain-inc-and-recall-holdings-ltd-proposed-final-judgment-and-competitive) found that where Iron Mountain and Recall met, they "competed aggressively against one another for customers, resulting in lower prices for RMS". Adjusted EBITDA margin is a non-GAAP measure, and the Q2 2026 release (https://s204.q4cdn.com/148941814/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/FINAL-Q2-2026-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf) shows it at 35.8% for the company against 36.7% a year earlier. | moderate Price is contributing but bounded. In prepared remarks on the Q2 fiscal 2026 call (2026-05-06) the CFO said Americas adjusted segment EBITDA margin "improved 100 basis points to 19.5%, driven by higher volume and price realization", though in Q&A he said "a lot of that came from pure growth and leverage"; on tariffs he said "we'll be able to pass on some of that risk to pricing dynamics in the market." Stored fundamentals from the FY2025 10-K show gross profit of $7,804 million on $22,331 million of revenue (fiscal 2023), $8,077 million on $22,952 million (fiscal 2024) and $8,592 million on $23,596 million (fiscal 2025). The limits are in Item 1A: on backlog "prices on such orders are typically fixed; therefore, in the short-term, our ability to adjust for changes in certain commodity prices is limited"; "many of our customers permit quarterly or other periodic adjustments to pricing" but "we may bear the risk of price increases that occur between any such repricing"; and reduced demand "may also erode average selling prices". On the same call the CEO said that in security service "the balance between volume and price probably hasn't been appropriately been managed" and that it is "a little less differentiated, HVAC Applied being the most differentiated." |
| Summary | MaxLinear is a fabless designer of RF, analog and mixed-signal communications SoCs whose core skill, per its FY2025 10-K, is combining broadband RF and analog front ends with digital signal processing in standard CMOS. It sells into broadband access (cable, fiber PON and DSL gateways - approximately 44% of 2025 net revenue), home connectivity (Wi-Fi, MoCA, G.hn and Ethernet), wired and wireless infrastructure including optical data-center DSPs, and industrial and multi-market interface and power products. After a downturn that took revenue from $693,263 thousand in 2023 to $360,528 thousand in 2024, the AI optical ramp is turning it around: the Q2 2026 release reports revenue of $168,847 thousand, up 55% year over year, with the infrastructure business up 145% on the Keystone PAM4 DSP ramp for 800G, and management raised its 2026 optical data-center revenue outlook to $210 million-$230 million on the call. The moat question is whether that growth rests on anything durable. In optical DSPs MaxLinear entered as a lower-priced second source to Marvell; elsewhere it competes with Broadcom, Qualcomm, Realtek and MediaTek, which can integrate the functions it sells; customers are concentrated; and the 10-K still carries the Silicon Motion arbitration over its terminated merger, whose outcome it says it cannot predict. On this record MaxLinear is a technically capable challenger without a moat. | Iron Mountain stores and manages physical records for, per its FY2025 10-K, more than 240,000 customers in 61 countries, "including approximately 95% of the Fortune 1000", with "no single customer accounting for more than approximately 3% of revenue". Revenue was $6,901,737 thousand in 2025, of which the Global RIM segment contributed $5,291,481 thousand and the Global Data Center segment $803,429 thousand. The records business is the moat. Storage rental agreements "generally range from one to five years in length", the company says it has "consistently experienced strong customer retention levels", and a 2016 Department of Justice complaint described Iron Mountain as "the largest RMS company in the United States" and permanent withdrawal fees as a barrier to rivals winning customers. That lock-in shows up as pricing: MD&A attributes Global RIM storage growth to "revenue management" while Item 1A says volumes "were relatively steady in 2025". The threat is substitution: activity is declining as records become "less active and more archival", and a shift to non-paper storage "could adversely affect our businesses". The growth arms sit outside that moat. The company operated 31 data centers across 21 markets with 488 MW of capacity approximately 97% leased and a weighted average lease expiration of 10.3 years, counts "five of the largest global hyperscalers among our customers", and on 2026-08-05 reported data center leasing of 110 megawatts year to date and second-quarter revenue of $2.0 billion, up 18.5%. But in data centres it competes with operators owning "properties comparable to ours", and in asset lifecycle management with hyperscalers' own programmes. A durable switching-cost franchise in a market expected only to hold steady, funding growth businesses that compete on power, location and price, is a narrow moat. | Johnson Controls designs, manufactures, installs and services commercial HVAC equipment (YORK chillers, Silent-Aire air handling, Frick and Sabroe industrial refrigeration), building controls (Metasys, the OpenBlue software platform), and fire and security systems (Simplex, Grinnell, Ansul), after selling its residential and light commercial HVAC business to Bosch on 31 July 2025. Per its FY2025 10-K, products and systems were about 68% of fiscal 2025 sales from continuing operations and services 32%, backlog was $16.6 billion at 30 September 2025, and the company employed about 87,000 people. The 10-K's case for an edge is the installed base: a large direct channel installs the company's own equipment, which "leads to significant repeat business for the maintenance, retrofit and replacement markets". Data centres are where the business is growing fastest: Omdia research on the 2023 market, reported in June 2024, put Johnson Controls among the top three data-centre cooling suppliers with Vertiv and Stulz, and on the Q2 fiscal 2026 call the CEO said the coolant distribution unit (CDU) business "has just started to ramp" with about $100 million expected that year. The Q3 fiscal 2026 release (2026-07-29) reported organic orders up 27% and a backlog of $21.0 billion, with Americas orders up 37% "supported by sustained demand from data centers and other mission-critical environments". The limits are in the same 10-K: contracts are negotiated or competitively awarded with price among the factors, a long list of large competitors (Honeywell, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Carrier, Trane, Vertiv, API Group, Daikin), a highly fragmented services market, fixed prices on backlog, and the 10-K's own warning that liquid cooling is a technology it must keep pace with. On the Q2 call the CEO also said security service is "a little less differentiated" than applied HVAC. A lifecycle service edge on a large installed base, in markets shared with several large rivals, is a narrow moat. |
| Chain position | MaxLinear sells chips, much of it through Asian distributors, ODMs and module makers - products shipped to Asia were 82% of 2025 net revenue, including 49% to Hong Kong - that build cable modems, PON terminals, Wi-Fi gateways, base-station radios and optical transceivers for operators and hyperscale data centers. In the AI chain it sits beside the optical-module makers as a DSP supplier, competing with Marvell and Broadcom and, at vertically integrated module makers, with internally supplied components. | In the AI build-out Iron Mountain is a landlord and a recycler. It leases data center capacity to hyperscale customers, with "five of the largest global hyperscalers among our customers", and its ALM business "provides hyperscale and corporate IT infrastructure managers with services and solutions that enable the decommissioning, data erasure, processing and disposition, and recycling or sale of IT hardware and component assets". Upstream, Item 1A says "We rely on third parties to provide power to our data centers" and that construction depends on "one or more design firms, general contractors, and associated subcontractors". | Johnson Controls sits on the facility side of the AI build-out: the 10-K lists data centers among the customers of all three regional segments and under "Capitalize on Key Growth Vectors", and Item 1A names "cooling technology (including liquid cooling)" as a capability it must keep developing. On the Q2 fiscal 2026 call the CEO said its Silent-Aire air-handling franchise "is enjoying very healthy growth" even as liquid cooling is adopted, and that the CDU business "has just started to ramp". |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.01 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.24 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |