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.
| SAP | MACOM Technology Solutions | EMCOR Group | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | wide The 20-F describes a migration market made of SAP's own customers: RISE with SAP 'is targeted at our installed base customers and helps them on their journey from legacy ERP systems to SAP Business Suite' — an installed base so entrenched that moving WITHIN the vendor is a multi-year journey, with the Q2 2026 statement showing €22.9 billion of contractually committed cloud backlog, up 27%. | narrow MACOM’s FY2025 10-K describes advantages that are real but contested. On the durable side: a catalog of “thousands of standard and custom devices” serving “over 6,000 end customers”; its own compound-semiconductor fabs (GaAs, GaN and InP) in Lowell, Research Triangle Park, Ann Arbor and Limeil-Brévannes; a Lowell fab accredited by the U.S. Department of Defense with “Trusted Foundry” status, in markets where “a domestic fabrication facility may be a requirement to be a strategic supplier”; and product life cycles of five to ten years, “with some of our products generating revenue for over 20 years”. On the limiting side, the same filing calls its markets “highly competitive”, names ADI, Broadcom, Credo, Marvell, MaxLinear, Microchip, NXP, Qorvo, Semtech, Skyworks and Sumitomo among its significant competitors, “some of whom have greater financial resources and scale than us”, adds “increased competition from Chinese companies”, sells “primarily on a purchase order basis” with no minimum purchase commitments, and warns that “the ASPs of our products may decrease over time”. Its income statement reports gross profit of $385,797 thousand on revenue of $648,407 thousand in fiscal 2023, $393,773 thousand on $729,578 thousand in fiscal 2024 and $529,002 thousand on $967,258 thousand in fiscal 2025. Process know-how and defense accreditation that larger rivals can contest, product generation by product generation, is a narrow moat rather than a wide one. | narrow The FY2025 Form 10-K describes an edge that holds on large, complex work but not across the trade. On the advantage side, it says an invitation to bid "is often conditioned upon prior experience, technical capability, and financial strength", that its largest projects "typically require significant technical and management skills and the financial strength to obtain performance bonds, which are often a condition to bidding for and winning these projects", and that those projects "represented approximately 58% of our electrical and mechanical construction services revenues in 2025". It adds: "We believe our financial position, operating results, access to bank credit and surety bonding, technical expertise including prefabrication, VDC, and BIM capabilities, and safety record, among other factors, give us an advantage over many of our competitors." Operating margin was 10.1% in 2025 against 9.2% in 2024, and the filing notes the 2025 figure includes a $144.9 million gain on the sale of the United Kingdom operations that "positively impacted operating margin by 85 basis points". On the limiting side, the same Competition section says "relatively few barriers exist to prevent entry into the electrical and mechanical construction services industry" and "there are relatively few barriers to entry into the building services industry". Item 1A adds that "Certain of our competitors have lower overhead cost structures and, therefore, are able to provide their services at lower rates than we are currently able to provide" and that work "is frequently awarded through a competitive bidding process". An advantage confined to bonded, technically demanding projects, in a trade the company itself calls easy to enter, is a narrow moat, not a wide one. |
| Moat type | switching costs ERP is the system of record for a company's core processes; the 20-F's own strategy language — SAP Business Suite as 'the destination for all our customers,' with AI-enabled migration tools easing the journey off SAP's own legacy systems — is a switching-cost moat described from the inside. | intangibles ip The FY2025 10-K places the advantage in process and design know-how: “We continue to invest in proprietary processes, circuit design and packaging technologies”, “we utilize a broad array of internal, proprietary process technologies and commercially available foundry technologies”, and U.S.-based wafer fabrication “enables us to offer proprietary processes” and provides “a domestic source for U.S. I&D customers”. The filing itself says patents matter less than people: MACOM held 729 U.S. and 497 foreign issued patents as of October 3, 2025, but “we believe that our future success will be determined by the innovation, technical expertise and management abilities of our engineers and management more than by patent ownership”. Switching costs are the weaker candidate: long product life cycles help in Industrial & Defense, but sales are made on purchase orders and new business must be won through “a competitive selection process to develop semiconductors for use in our customers' systems, known in the industry as a ‘design win.’” | cost scale The 10-K places the advantage in capabilities that come with size rather than in customer lock-in or protected technology. The edge it names is "financial position, operating results, access to bank credit and surety bonding, technical expertise including prefabrication, VDC, and BIM capabilities, and safety record", delivered through "approximately 100 operating subsidiaries" and approximately 44,000 employees. MD&A credits the mechanical construction segment's 2025 result to "a more favorable mix of work and better project execution, including enhanced productivity, due in part to investments in virtual design and construction, prefabrication, and automation". Item 1A makes bonding a scale matter: "if we were to experience an interruption or reduction in the availability of bonding, we may be unable to compete for or work on certain projects." The filing cites no patents as a source of advantage, and switching costs are thin by its own account: "Many of our contracts, especially our building and industrial services contracts, may be canceled or delayed on short notice". |
| Leadership | clear leader Grounded in scale and position rather than an asserted share: the 20-F describes a market segment consisting of SAP's own legacy estates (RISE), and the Q2 statement shows Cloud ERP Suite revenue of €5.5 billion in a single quarter, up 25% — no competitor filing this site tracks describes an installed-base market of its own. | fast follower The only independent ranking found is for the optical analog line. Deep Fundamental’s “Deep Dive: Optical Module Market” of September 27, 2024 (https://deepfundamental.substack.com/p/deep-dive-optical-module-market) states “In the driver/TIA market, Marvell ($MRVL) and Macom ($MTSI) are the dominant players, especially in the high-end 400G+ segment” and “in the LPO market, Macom holds a significant advantage, largely because Marvell, strong in DSP, tends to promote solutions that include DSP”. That is a shared front rank, from an equity-research newsletter rather than a market tracker, and now two years old. MACOM’s own FY2025 10-K claims no rank - it says “We believe that we compete favorably” - and names significant competitors from ADI and Broadcom to Marvell and Sumitomo, “some of whom have greater financial resources and scale than us”. No third-party ranking was found for the Industrial & Defense or Telecom lines. A two-year-old newsletter covering one of three segments cannot carry a company-wide co-leader call, so the band is fast follower. | co leader The 10-K gives no market share. It calls the field "highly fragmented" with "thousands of small companies across the United States", adds that "there are a number of larger companies focused on providing electrical and/or mechanical construction services, such as APi Group Corporation, Comfort Systems USA, Inc., Dycom Industries, Inc., Everus Construction Group, Inc., IES Holdings, Inc., MasTec, Inc., MYR Group Inc., Quanta Services, Inc., and Tutor Perini Corporation", and describes EMCOR as "one of the largest specialty contractors in the United States", which is the company's own account. Outside the filing: Wikipedia's EMCOR article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emcor) states that "In 2025, the company was ranked 2nd by Engineering News-Record on its list of the largest 600 specialty contractors by revenue"; its footnote links ENR's 2025 Top 600 preview page, which refused this fetch with HTTP 403, so the rank was not read at ENR itself (the footnote's title also reads 2024 while its link is the 2025 page). Statista's summary of the ENR survey for 2018 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/467307/leading-us-firms-in-mechanical-based-on-revenue, published Oct 21, 2019) says "EMCOR Group was ranked as the leading mechanical contractor based in the United States in 2018" and that the overall survey was "topped by electrical contractor Quanta Services and closely followed by EMCOR Group". A filing-based check agrees on scale against one named rival: stored fundamentals from the FY2025 10-Ks show EMCOR revenue of $16,986,422 thousand against $9,101,641 thousand for Comfort Systems USA (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1035983/000110465926017530/0001104659-26-017530-index.htm). Second place on a revenue ranking of 600 specialty contractors, in a field the 10-K says has thousands of firms, is co-leadership rather than clear leadership; the ranking evidence is second-hand or dated, so the band is held at co-leader and no higher. |
| Pricing power | moderate Q2 2026: total revenue up 9% with non-IFRS operating profit up 7% — profit growing slightly behind revenue, and the 2026 profit outlook 'updated to reflect dilutive impact from Dremio and Prior Labs acquisitions' rather than raised. | moderate The FY2025 10-K says “the ASPs of our products may decrease over time, and we must introduce new products that can be manufactured at lower costs or that command higher prices based on superior performance to offset price erosion”. On inflation it says MACOM has “generally been able to offset increases in these costs through various productivity and cost reduction initiatives, as well as adjusting our selling prices to pass through some of these higher costs to our customers; however, our ability to raise or maintain our selling prices depends on market conditions and competitive dynamics.” Margins have risen with the Data Center mix: the fiscal Q3 2026 earnings release (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001493594/000149359426000036/ex99_1earningsreleaseq3fy26.htm) reports GAAP gross margin of 58.3%, compared to 55.3% a year earlier, and guides fiscal Q4 adjusted gross margin to between 60.0% and 61.0%. The release does not say how much of that is price rather than mix or fab utilisation. | moderate Margins have widened, but the filing says most work is bid. The 2025 Annual Report's five-year highlights show gross profit of $1,501,737 thousand on revenues of $9,903,580 thousand in 2021, $2,089,339 thousand on $12,582,873 thousand in 2023 and $3,282,988 thousand on $16,986,422 thousand in 2025; MD&A gives gross profit margin of 19.3% in 2025 against 19.0% in 2024. The Q2 2026 release (https://emcorgroup.com/application/files/3517/8535/6062/2Q26_Earnings_Release_Final.pdf) reports operating margin of 10.6% against 9.6% a year earlier, and the chief executive said "We remain focused on maintaining pricing discipline, carefully selecting project opportunities, and executing at a high level across our operations." The limits are in the 10-K: "Competition can place downward pressure on our contract prices and profit margins"; on commodities, "While we believe we can increase our prices to adjust for some price increases in commodities, there can be no assurance that price increases of commodities, if they were to occur, would be recoverable", and "certain of our contracts do not allow us to adjust our prices"; and Note 3 shows projects whose profitability was revised down by more than $1.0 million each reduced operating results by $85,941 thousand in 2025, against $66,319 thousand in 2024. |
| Summary | SAP monetizes the stickiest software estate in enterprise computing twice over: a declining on-premise support stream and a growing cloud one, with the 20-F's 'flywheel' — Business AI enhancing Cloud ERP, which feeds Business Data Cloud, which fuels the AI — as the argument that the transition compounds rather than cannibalizes. The caveat is regulatory, in the filing's own words: the European Commission opened formal proceedings over on-premise maintenance and support policies, with suggested remedies market-tested in 2025 and 'pending final EC approval in 2026' — the moat's support-pricing half is under review. | MACOM is a broad-line analog, RF, microwave and optical semiconductor maker that, unusually for its size, runs its own compound-semiconductor fabs, including a Lowell, Massachusetts fab with Department of Defense “Trusted Foundry” accreditation. Its FY2025 10-K splits the business into Industrial & Defense (radar, electronic warfare, data links, SATCOM, medical and test and measurement), Data Center (TIAs, modulator drivers, lasers and photodetectors for 800G, 1.6T and 3.2T optical transceivers) and Telecom (long-haul and metro optics, 5G, SATCOM and FTTx/PON). The AI build-out has made Data Center the fastest-growing piece: the fiscal Q3 2026 10-Q (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1493594/000149359426000038/mtsi-20260703.htm) reports Data Center revenue of $137,584 thousand for the quarter against $75,822 thousand a year earlier, out of total revenue of $342,237 thousand, and the accompanying release reports GAAP gross margin of 58.3%. An independent 2024 newsletter places MACOM with Marvell at the front of the optical driver/TIA market and ahead in linear-drive (LPO) optics. The moat stays narrow because each speed generation is re-won through design wins against larger rivals - the 10-K names ADI, Broadcom, Credo, Marvell, MaxLinear, Microchip, NXP, Qorvo, Semtech, Skyworks and Sumitomo, plus Chinese competitors - on purchase orders without minimum commitments, and the filing expects average selling prices to fall over time. | EMCOR Group installs and services electrical and mechanical systems in non-residential buildings and plants. Its FY2025 10-K reports revenues of $16.99 billion, approximately 72% from construction operations, approximately 21% from building services and approximately 7% from industrial services, through "approximately 100 operating subsidiaries"; the United Kingdom operations were sold on December 1, 2025. Data centres now drive the construction book: the network and communications market sector was $2,461,883 thousand, or 48%, of electrical construction segment revenue in 2025, against 34% in 2023, and $1,670,355 thousand, or 23%, of mechanical construction segment revenue, against 8% in 2023. Remaining performance obligations were $13.25 billion at the end of 2025, and the Q2 2026 results release (2026-07-30) put them at "a record $17.14 billion, compared to $11.91 billion as of June 30, 2025", with revenue guidance for 2026 raised to $20.00 billion - $20.50 billion. The 10-K's case for an edge is that bids for large work are "often conditioned upon prior experience, technical capability, and financial strength" and require performance bonds, and that EMCOR's balance sheet, bonding, prefabrication and VDC capabilities and safety record "give us an advantage over many of our competitors". The same filing sets the limits: the industry is "highly fragmented and our competition includes thousands of small companies across the United States", "relatively few barriers exist to prevent entry", most revenue comes from "projects requiring competitive bids", some rivals can price "at lower rates than we are currently able to provide", customers' in-house staff compete for building services, and the 10-K warns that if data centre spending "were to decrease, demand for our services could decline as we transition our resources to other sectors". Gross margin rose to 19.3% in 2025 from 19.0% in 2024, which MD&A attributes to "improved revenue mix and excellent project execution". A scale and execution edge on large, bonded projects, re-tested at every bid in an industry with low entry barriers, is a narrow moat. |
| Chain position | Layer-10 application incumbent embedding AI (Joule, Business AI) into the enterprise system of record. | MACOM sells components that customers build into larger systems - the FY2025 10-K lists wireless basestations, high-capacity optical networks, data center networks, radar, medical systems, satellite networks and test and measurement. In the AI chain it sits upstream of optical-module makers, supplying TIAs, drivers, lasers and photodetectors for 800G and 1.6T transceivers. Sales to distributors were 32.3% of fiscal 2025 revenue, two resellers took 12.4% and 11.2%, and no direct customer reached 10%. | EMCOR builds the electrical and mechanical plant inside facilities, increasingly data centres: the 10-K says capital spending on data center infrastructure "is rapidly expanding, which has increased demand for our services in recent years". It works directly for owners and "indirectly by acting as a subcontractor to general contractors, systems suppliers, construction managers, developers, property managers, and other subcontractors". Upstream, "we rely on third-party vendors and manufacturers to supply much of the materials and equipment necessary for our operations", with commodity exposure to "copper and steel" and fuel for a fleet of approximately 14,400 vehicles. |
| Products (share / barrier) |
|
|
|
| Long-horizon vote | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |