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.
| Tokyo Electron | C3.ai | Tesla, Inc. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow Integrated Report 2026 (issued 2026-09-15) documents strong positions across the line: by Tokyo Electron's own estimate it ranks No. 1 in diffusion furnaces, batch deposition, metal deposition, coater/developers, gas chemical etch and wafer probers, No. 2 in plasma etch and bonders and No. 3 in cleaning, and holds a "100% share" of coater/developers for EUV lithography; its installed base, industry-leading by its own estimate, is approximately 100,000 units, growing by approximately 4,000-6,000 units a year; and its 26,592 patents rank No. 1 in the semiconductor production equipment industry on the LexisNexis PatentSight+ database. Reported returns stayed high through a sales decline: gross profit margin stayed between 44.6% and 47.1% and ROE between 21.8% and 37.2% across fiscal 2022-2026, including fiscal 2024 when net sales fell to ¥1,830.5 billion. The share ranks, the EUV share and the installed-base lead are company estimates, not third-party data. | eroding The FY2026 10-K's own financial statements show revenue down ~36% year over year to $250.3M with GAAP gross profit collapsing from $235.9M to $77.4M, while its Competition section concedes the primary competition is do-it-yourself platforms assembled from hyperscaler and open-source components and that strategic partners may offer substantially similar solutions — differentiation that is visibly failing to defend share or price in a growing enterprise-AI market. | narrow Tesla's FY2025 10-K calls the automotive market "highly competitive" and expects it to "become even more competitive," and its energy-storage market "also highly competitive"; gross margin compressed from ~25.6% (FY2022) to ~18% (FY2023-FY2025) amid price cuts — a real but contested moat, not a wide one. |
| Moat type | intangibles ip The report calls its patent portfolio its "fifth strength" and says that "by supporting our other four strengths, it serves a vital role as the foundation" for medium- to long-term corporate value: 26,592 patents as of March 31, 2026, 1,415 inventions created in Japan and 345 overseas in 2025, and Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators recognition for the fifth consecutive year. The other strengths rest on the same proprietary process know-how — co-created technology roadmaps that evaluate technologies "for the next four generations and beyond" with customers, "numerous development PORs" (process of record) in the frontend business, and the EUV coater/developer position — so proprietary process technology, reinforced by qualification in customers' process flows, is the moat source. | intangibles ip The 10-K's 'Strategic Competitive IP Advantage' section grounds the remaining moat in patents — 33 issued U.S. patents including a foundational agentic-AI orchestration patent (US 12,111,859) — and the patented model-driven architecture the filing presents as its sustainable competitive advantage. | intangibles ip The 10-K attributes Tesla's differentiation to a "vertically integrated business model, and focus on user experience," delivering "AI-related and enhanced software" via FSD (Supervised) and neural-network capabilities — a brand-plus-proprietary-technology (EV/battery + autonomy) intangible edge. |
| Leadership | co leader The CEO's message describes Tokyo Electron as "one of the world's leading suppliers of semiconductor production equipment" and states a "goal of becoming number one globally" — it does not claim to be the largest supplier overall — while by its own estimate it ranks No. 1 in six charted segments (diffusion furnace, batch deposition, metal deposition, coater/developer, gas chemical etch, wafer prober), No. 2 in plasma etch and bonders, and No. 3 in cleaning. | behind Despite tracker recognitions the filing cites (a Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave for AI/ML Platforms; 2024-2025 Constellation ShortLists), FY2026 revenue contracted ~36% while the filing describes the AI software market as expanding past $450B — a franchise losing ground to the DIY and hyperscaler alternatives its own Competition section names. | co leader A leading global EV maker whose Model Y is among the world's best-selling vehicles, but the 10-K acknowledges "a significant and growing number of established and new" competitors entering EVs, and Tesla competes in autonomy/robotics as one of several players. |
| Pricing power | moderate Gross profit margin held in a 44.6%-47.1% range over fiscal 2022-2026, including fiscal 2024's sales decline, but in fiscal 2026 it fell 1.8 points to 45.3% "due to factors such as higher raw material prices and increased labor costs" even as net sales reached a record, and the CEO lists "revising prices appropriately with respect to cost increases caused by inflation" among five initiatives needed to improve the operating margin. | weak GAAP gross margin fell from ~61% in FY2025 to ~31% in FY2026 per the 10-K income statement, and the filing describes its consumption-based pricing model as adopted to make products 'easier and less costly' to adopt — the opposite of pricing leverage. | moderate Gross margin fell from ~25.6% (FY2022) to ~18.0% (FY2025) as Tesla cut prices to defend volume, though it remains above most auto peers (SEC financials in the FY2025 10-K). |
| Summary | Tokyo Electron makes wafer fab equipment for what its Integrated Report 2026 calls the "four key processes necessary for semiconductor scaling: deposition, coater/developer, etch, and cleaning", plus wafer probers and bonders for test and advanced packaging. The report grounds its edge in breadth and incumbency: leading share estimates in most of its segments, an estimated 100% share of EUV coater/developers, an installed base of approximately 100,000 units, industry-leading by its own estimate, feeding a Field Solutions business that sold ¥626.0 billion of parts, services, used equipment and modifications in fiscal 2026, and the industry's largest patent portfolio. Fiscal 2026 net sales were a record ¥2,443,533 million, but gross profit margin fell 1.8 points to 45.3% on higher raw material prices and labor costs, and operating margin fell 3.1 points to 25.6% as R&D expenses rose 11.1% to ¥277,866 million. China accounted for 34.1% of fiscal 2026 net sales, down from 41.7% the year before. | C3.ai's residual moat is intellectual property: a patented model-driven architecture the FY2026 10-K credits with ~26x faster application development, a 33-patent U.S. portfolio including the first foundational agentic-AI orchestration patent, and prebuilt applications encoding 15 years of industry domain knowledge. The same filing concedes its primary competition is do-it-yourself platforms built from hyperscaler and open-source components, and FY2026 results — revenue down ~36% to $250M with GAAP gross margin roughly halved to ~31% — show that IP has not defended pricing or share. | Tesla's edge rests on a vertically integrated manufacturing model, a strong brand, the Supercharger network, a fast-growing energy-storage business, and the largest supervised-FSD fleet feeding its autonomy neural networks. But its FY2025 10-K itself calls both the automotive and energy-storage markets "highly competitive" and expects auto to become "even more competitive," and gross margin has compressed from ~26% to ~18%, so the moat is durable but contested rather than wide. |
| Chain position | Upstream equipment supplier to chipmakers: fiscal 2026 new-equipment sales of ¥1,775.4 billion went 59% to non-memory (logic, foundry, others), 31% to DRAM and 10% to NAND; by region, China took 34.1%, South Korea 22.3% and Taiwan 20.4% of net sales. | Application-layer pure play: sells prebuilt enterprise-AI applications and an agentic platform to industrial and government end users, downstream of the hyperscaler clouds and LLM providers it deploys on. | Downstream AI application/end-user: consumes AI compute (NVIDIA) and custom inference silicon (Samsung/TSMC) to build autonomy (FSD/Robotaxi) and robotics (Optimus). |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |