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.
| NetApp | Intel | Walmart | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | 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. | 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 Graded on the Item 1A text this run could read from the FY2026 10-K, which is where the filing argues hardest against a wide band. It says "each of our segments competes for customers, employees, digital prominence, products and services" with local, regional, national and global physical, eCommerce and omnichannel retailers, social commerce platforms, wholesale club operators, retail intermediaries "and emerging agentic shopping tools and platforms," that "the omnichannel retail landscape is highly competitive and rapidly evolving, and the entry of new, well-funded competitors, or more rapid development of AI capabilities and agentic tools by these competitors ... may increase competitive pressures," and concedes that "for eCommerce and other internet-based businesses, newer or smaller businesses may be better able to innovate and compete with us" and that there "can be no assurance" Walmart can adopt AI "as quickly or effectively as our competitors." It also warns of retail consolidation producing rivals with "improved financial resources, improved access to merchandise, greater market penetration." The filing claims no market share, rank or scale advantage anywhere in the text available here, and its own competitive-landscape discussion sits in Item 1, which the cached read-through returned only as a cross-reference; a wider band would not be sourced. |
| Moat type | 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 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).' | cost scale What the readable text does describe as durable is physical and logistical scale rather than lock-in or IP. It says Walmart sources "from a wide variety of domestic and international suppliers," that global sourcing is "an important factor in our financial performance," and that finding suppliers able to supply "in the large volumes we may demand" is itself a challenge; it describes a network of stores, clubs and distribution and fulfillment centers in which "many products available for purchase online can be picked up by the customer or member at a local Walmart store or Sam's Club, which provides additional customer traffic at such stores and clubs"; and it lists "supply chain automation and enhancements" among the investments backing the strategy. The first competitive lever it names is "the prices at which we sell our merchandise." The filing offers no intangibles or switching-cost claim beyond noting that protection of its trademarks, copyrights, domain names, patents and trade secrets "may not be available in every jurisdiction." |
| Leadership | 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". | 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 10-K text available this run asserts no rank or share for Walmart. The band reflects two things the filing does say: that its strategy is meant to let it "maintain or grow our overall market position" across segments that already compete at global scale, and that it does not describe itself as ahead in the channels that matter most to it - "for eCommerce and other internet-based businesses, newer or smaller businesses may be better able to innovate and compete with us," and on AI adoption "there can be no assurance that these investments will deliver the anticipated benefits, or that we will be able to adopt and leverage these technologies as quickly or effectively as our competitors." Treat this band as bounded by the missing Item 1 competition discussion, not as a measured position. |
| Pricing power | 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. | 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. | weak The filing names price first among the ways it competes - "we compete in a variety of ways, including the prices at which we sell our merchandise" - and states that higher supplier labour and material costs may "adversely impact product margins ... that we are unable, or choose not, to pass on to our customers." It adds that macro conditions can "change the mix of products we sell to any one or more markets with a lower average gross margin" and "result in slower inventory turnover and greater markdowns of inventory." In health and wellness the price is set by counterparties, not by Walmart: "a large majority of our retail pharmacy net sales are generated by filling prescriptions for which we receive payment through established contractual relationships with third-party payers and payment administrators, such as private insurers, governmental agencies and pharmacy benefit managers," exposing it to "reductions in the third-party reimbursement rates for drugs." |
| Summary | 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. | 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.' | In the FY2026 10-K text readable this run, Walmart describes an "enterprise strategy, which combines traditional retail, membership models, marketplaces, financial services, health and wellness and other customer and business services into a series of interconnected assets to make it seamless for customers to interact with us," carried by stores, clubs and distribution and fulfillment centers that double as pickup and delivery nodes and by continuing investment in eCommerce, AI and supply chain automation. The filing sets its own limits on that: it calls the omnichannel landscape "highly competitive and rapidly evolving," warns that well-funded entrants and faster AI or agentic tooling by rivals may increase pressure, that smaller businesses may out-innovate it online, and that "a greater concentration of eCommerce sales, including increasing online grocery sales and the increasing role of AI-enabled platforms in product search, discovery, advertising and purchasing, could result in a reduction in the amount of traffic in our stores and clubs." On economics it concedes supplier cost increases it may be "unable, or choose not, to pass on to our customers," and it points investors to "advertising and other higher-margin initiatives (which are expected to help drive our operating income growth at a rate faster than net sales over the long term)" rather than to price. |
| Chain position | 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". | 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. | A retailer that also intermediates: it sells its own sourced merchandise, hosts third-party marketplace sellers for whom it may provide "fulfillment, inventory management, tax collection, payment processing, content," sells digital advertising against that traffic, dispenses prescriptions under PBM and payer contracts, and offers financial services "including through our digital channels, stores and clubs, as well as our OnePay fintech venture." |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.24 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.05 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |