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 | NVIDIA | Moderna | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | wide Wide: the CUDA software platform and its developer installed base create high switching costs across the AI-training stack, defended by $76.7B cumulative R&D and reinforced by ~71% FY2026 gross margins and Data Center revenue (~90% of total) up 68% YoY — durable, hard-to-replicate advantages per the FY2026 10-K. | narrow The FY2025 10-K supports a real but bounded advantage. The Competition section says the company believes "mRNA as a medicine coupled with our capabilities across mRNA technology, drug discovery, development and manufacturing provide us with a competitive advantage," and the Intellectual Property section backs that with more than 260 issued or allowed U.S. patents or applications, more than 140 granted or allowed outside the U.S., 485 pending applications, and latest-to-expire granted patents on all three approved products projected to 2041 in the U.S. and 2036 in Europe. Item 1A cuts the band down from wide: it opens the competition risk with "The vaccine market, and pharmaceutical market more generally, is intensely competitive," says Moderna "ha[s] been excluded from selling our COVID vaccines in many European markets due to a competitor's contract with the European Commission, which does not lapse until year-end 2026," that in RSV it "entered a market already occupied by two larger competitors," and that rivals "have exploited and may in the future exploit their greater size, infrastructure, resources and experience." The same section reports net losses of $2.8 billion in 2025 and $3.6 billion in 2024 against 2025 total revenue of $1.9 billion. |
| 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 edge rests on proprietary IP and software: the full-stack CUDA development platform running on all NVIDIA GPUs plus hundreds of proprietary domain libraries/SDKs/APIs, and $76.7B cumulative R&D yielding "inventions that are essential to modern computing" (NVIDIA invented the GPU in 1999). This is reinforced by developer-ecosystem network effects and CUDA switching costs, per the FY2026 10-K Business section. | intangibles ip The filing locates the advantage in a patent and know-how estate, not in customer lock-in or cost. Intellectual Property describes "an expansive, multi-layered IP estate" whose platform claims cover mRNA chemistry, sequence optimization, engineering elements, LNP delivery systems and "innovative processes for the manufacture and analysis of mRNA drug substance and formulated drug product," alongside "substantial proprietary know-how associated with related manufacturing processes" and a trademark portfolio of at least 1,400 registrations. Nothing in the filing claims switching costs or a cost advantage; Item 1A says the opposite, that competitors leverage "larger supply chains and greater purchasing power." |
| 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". | clear leader FY2026 Data Center revenue was $193.7B (~90% of the $215.9B total), up 68% YoY on the Blackwell ramp, and NVIDIA describes itself as "a data center scale AI infrastructure company reshaping all industries." The 10-K frames named rivals as parties who "provide or intend to provide" GPUs/accelerators — incumbent-leader positioning. | co leader The Business section opens with the company's own claim that "Moderna is a pioneer and leader in the field of mRNA medicine." The Competition section frames the commercial reality more narrowly as a contest against a small named set: "We largely compete against Pfizer and BioNTech for sales of our COVID vaccines, whose vaccine is also based on mRNA technology. We also compete against other vaccines, including Sanofi and Novavax's." It does not claim a rank anywhere, and it places Moderna behind in the other approved category: in RSV "we compete against Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, who entered the U.S. market prior to us, and our RSV sales have been minimal to date." |
| 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. | strong FY2026 gross margin was 71.1% (75.0% in FY2025); per the 10-K MD&A the ~3.9pt decline reflects the Hopper HGX→Blackwell full-system mix shift and a one-time $4.5B H20 excess-inventory/purchase-obligation charge, not competitive price erosion. A low-70s% hardware gross margin evidences strong pricing power. | weak Item 1A states that "certain U.S. private vaccine market practices, including regarding discounts, rebates and returns, may cause us to realize significantly lower revenues than list prices," and that "in some instances, our competitors have been able to offer more attractive terms than we can, and they may continue to do so in the future." On the flu candidate it says that in a well-developed market Moderna "may need to offer more favorable terms to gain market share (which we may be unable to do), which may negatively impact our profitability." The Commercial section adds that its markets are "characterized, particularly in the U.S. (our largest market), by a fragmented end customer base, unpredictability in orders and seasonality of deliveries." |
| 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. | NVIDIA pairs market-leading accelerated-computing hardware (the Blackwell data-center platform) with a proprietary full-stack software moat — CUDA plus hundreds of domain libraries — funded by $76.7B of cumulative R&D, and its "large and growing number of developers and installed base... strengthens our ecosystem and increases the value of our platform for our customers" (FY2026 10-K). Competition is intensifying from AMD, Intel and Huawei, and from hyperscalers (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft) designing internal AI silicon, but rivals must overcome NVIDIA's entrenched CUDA software ecosystem to displace it. | Moderna's 10-K rests its competitive case on the mRNA platform and the IP wrapped around it: the company states it believes its capabilities "across mRNA technology, drug discovery, development and manufacturing" differentiate it, and reports more than 260 issued or allowed U.S. patents or applications, more than 140 granted or allowed abroad, 485 pending applications, and granted patents on Spikevax, mNEXSPIKE and mRESVIA projected to expire in 2041 (U.S.) and 2036 (Europe), plus trade secrets and manufacturing know-how it calls substantial. The filing is equally direct about the limits: the principal COVID rival's vaccine "is also based on mRNA technology"; a competitor's European Commission contract keeps Moderna out of many European COVID markets until year-end 2026; RSV sales are "minimal to date" behind Pfizer and GSK; and the risk factors warn that "the mRNA medicines field is growing rapidly, with increased competitive pressure from large and more established pharmaceutical companies." What is durable is science and plant rather than commercial position: Moderna bought and operates the Norwood (MTC) campus, completed a Marlborough site purpose-built for intismeran autogene that began shipping patient batches in September 2025, and runs UK, Canada and Australia facilities that were fully licensed in 2025, each government having entered a multi-year commitment to purchase mRNA products from the company. |
| 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". | Upstream compute-platform supplier: NVIDIA sells full-stack data-center systems (GPU + Arm CPU + DPU + NVLink/InfiniBand networking + CUDA software) to cloud providers and enterprises, and relies on third-party foundry/assembly-test-packaging partners (e.g., SPIL, Amkor, Wistron, Fabrinet). Per the FY2026 10-K, several of its largest customers (hyperscalers such as Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft) are simultaneously customers and emerging competitors developing internal accelerated-computing silicon. | A vertically integrated mRNA developer-manufacturer that sits between upstream licensors and government or retail buyers: it in-licenses the Penn modified-mRNA patents non-exclusively through Cellscript and mRNA RiboTherapeutics at low-single-digit royalties and NIAID's prefusion coronavirus spike and prefusion RSV F patents, manufactures drug substance at the owned Norwood MTC campus and individualized therapy at Marlborough, runs Moderna-built plants in the UK, Canada and Australia against multi-year government purchase commitments, and relies on CMOs for critical raw material production and fill-finish. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.42 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.05 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. |