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.
| Semtech | CrowdStrike | Johnson Controls International | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow Semtech’s FY2026 10-K (fiscal year ended January 25, 2026) supports a narrow moat and no more. On the durable side, it owns the LoRa® radio franchise - “our LoRa® devices and wireless radio frequency technology” - which IoT Analytics’ LPWAN Market 2024 release (https://iot-analytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/INSIGHTS-RELEASE-LPWAN-Market-2024.pdf) ranks first outside China at 41% of LPWAN connections, and it argues that scarce analog talent “has historically made it more difficult for new suppliers in the analog market to quickly develop products and gain significant market share.” On the limiting side, the same filing says its patents do not “create definitive competitive barriers to entry”, that average selling prices “have historically decreased rapidly”, that some customers “can stop incorporating our products into their own products with limited notice to us and suffer little or no penalty”, and that customers in China (including Hong Kong) were 47% of fiscal 2026 net sales. The record is uneven: its income statement shows gross profit of $296,250 thousand on net sales of $868,758 thousand in fiscal 2024, $456,528 thousand on $909,287 thousand in fiscal 2025 and $542,144 thousand on $1,049,975 thousand in fiscal 2026, and the 10-K says difficulties “have adversely impacted” its ability to realise the benefits of the Sierra Wireless acquisition. | narrow Narrow rather than wide because the FY2026 10-K argues both ways and its own risk factors are the harder side: it describes a self-reinforcing data advantage and says "we do not believe any of our competitors currently have a true platform offering equivalent to the Falcon platform", but the same filing calls the market for security and IT operations solutions "intensely competitive, fragmented", warns that "Competitive pricing pressure may reduce our gross profits", and still carries the July 19 Incident as having "had, and is expected to continue to have, an adverse effect on our business, sales, customer and partner relations, reputation" more than two years after it occurred. | 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 | intangibles ip The defensible assets the 10-K describes are intellectual: the LoRa® radio technology, analog and mixed-signal design expertise - “The development of IP and the resulting proprietary products is a critical success factor for us” - and 303 U.S. and 541 foreign patents. The filing itself discounts the patent part (“we do not believe they create definitive competitive barriers to entry”), which leaves the moat in proprietary technology and scarce design know-how rather than in scale or lock-in: Semtech outsources most manufacturing, sold 74% of fiscal 2026 net sales through independent distributors, and its customer agreements “do not require them to purchase a minimum quantity of our products”. | network effects The 10-K states the mechanism directly: "The more data that is fed into our Falcon platform, the more intelligent the AI Security Cloud becomes, the stronger our ability to anticipate and counter evolving adversary tradecraft, and the more our customers benefit, creating a powerful network effect that increases the overall value we provide." | 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 LoRa, the technology Semtech owns, leads outside China; elsewhere Semtech is contesting the front rank. IoT Analytics’ March 21, 2024 release states “When excluding all LPWAN data from China, LoRa has the leading share of global LPWAN connections at 41%—more than double NB-IoT’s share”, though “Globally, NB-IoT has the largest share of LPWAN connections at approximately 54%” and “LoRa’s share of LPWAN connections is decreasing”. In data-center optics, management said on the fiscal Q2 2027 call (TradingKey machine transcript, https://www.tradingkey.com/news/transcripts/262131465-tradingkey) that at “800 gig, we had the market share about 18%. So over the 2 years, we have grown the market share well over 50% for 800 gig”, a company figure; an independent September 2024 newsletter (Deep Fundamental) had instead named Marvell and MACOM “the dominant players” in drivers and TIAs and said Semtech “has struggled to keep pace since the transition to 200G”. A third-party lead measured at the technology level rather than as Semtech’s own share, a company-reported share that the only independent view contradicts, and no ranking for its other lines do not evidence co-leadership, so the band is fast follower. | co leader Co-leader rather than clear leader because the only claim of platform primacy available is the company's own ("we do not believe any of our competitors currently have a true platform offering equivalent"), while the same 10-K describes a fragmented market and lists seven distinct categories of competitor, from legacy antivirus to network security, cloud security, identity and legacy SIEM vendors. | 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 The 10-K describes a market where prices fall: “In the past, we have reduced the average selling prices of our products in anticipation of future competitive pricing pressures”, and Semtech’s products “are typically differentiated in performance but are priced competitively”. Margins have nonetheless climbed with the data-center mix: the fiscal Q2 2027 release (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000088941/000008894126000028/smtc-07262026x8k991.htm) reports GAAP gross margin of 53.8% against 52.1% a year earlier and guides fiscal Q3 adjusted gross margin to 58.3% +/- 100 bps, or 63.9% excluding the business held for sale. The release does not separate price from mix. | moderate The 10-K's risk factors state that "Competitive pricing pressure may reduce our gross profits" and that competing successfully may require "aggressive pricing", which is the company's own case against strong pricing power; the offsetting factor it cites is module consolidation on one sensor. | 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 | Semtech is an analog and mixed-signal chipmaker being reshaped around two franchises. The first is AI data-center connectivity in its Signal Integrity segment - FiberEdge TIAs and drivers for optical transceivers and CopperEdge redrivers for active copper cables - whose net sales the FY2026 10-K reports at $322,608 thousand in fiscal 2026 against $177,033 thousand in fiscal 2024; the March 2026 HieFo acquisition added foundries that make devices for data-center interconnects. The second is LoRa, the long-range, low-power radio that IoT Analytics ranks as the leading LPWAN technology outside China. Around them sit protection devices, sensing and power products, and the IoT Systems business inherited from Sierra Wireless, whose cellular-module unit Semtech has agreed to sell to Compal Electronics for US$62 million (ABI Research, September 9, 2026, https://www.abiresearch.com/market-research/insight/7788486-compal-electronics-takes-semtechs-mantle-t). Momentum is strong: the fiscal Q2 2027 release reports record net sales of $341.9 million, up 33% year over year, and management said data-center revenue hit a record $100 million in the quarter. But the 10-K is frank about limits - rapid ASP erosion, customers that can drop its parts with little notice, 47% of sales to China, competitors that are “much larger and better resourced than we are”, and patents that do not bar entry. Proprietary technology in two growing niches, rather than a locked-in customer base, makes the moat narrow. | A single lightweight sensor collects enterprise data once and reuses it across 33 cloud modules, and the pooled telemetry trains the models every customer is then defended by — the 10-K calls this crowdsourced, high-fidelity data "cloud-scale AI" and treats it as the fundamental differentiator from competitors. | 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 | Semtech sells mostly through independent distributors (74% of fiscal 2026 net sales) to OEMs. In AI data centers its FiberEdge and CopperEdge parts go into the optical transceivers and active copper cables that module and cable makers build, and the 10-K says hyperscale cloud providers “are generally our indirect customers”. Two customers took 14% and 11% of fiscal 2026 net sales, and customers in China (including Hong Kong) 47%. | AI-native security platform — an adopter and reseller of AI rather than a supplier of AI infrastructure. | 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 | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |