Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW – Get Free Report) and Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM – Get Free Report) are both large-cap technology companies, but which is the better business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their risk, analyst recommendations, earnings, institutional ownership, valuation, dividends and profitability.
Risk & Volatility
Snowflake has a beta of 1.33, meaning that its share price is 33% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Akamai Technologies has a beta of 0.63, meaning that its share price is 37% less volatile than the S&P 500.
Analyst Recommendations
This is a breakdown of recent ratings and price targets for Snowflake and Akamai Technologies, as provided by MarketBeat.com.
| Sell Ratings | Hold Ratings | Buy Ratings | Strong Buy Ratings | Rating Score | |
| Snowflake | 1 | 5 | 34 | 0 | 2.83 |
| Akamai Technologies | 2 | 9 | 13 | 0 | 2.46 |
Profitability
This table compares Snowflake and Akamai Technologies’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.
| Net Margins | Return on Equity | Return on Assets | |
| Snowflake | -20.07% | -47.20% | -10.92% |
| Akamai Technologies | 9.51% | 11.32% | 4.47% |
Valuation & Earnings
This table compares Snowflake and Akamai Technologies”s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.
| Gross Revenue | Price/Sales Ratio | Net Income | Earnings Per Share | Price/Earnings Ratio | |
| Snowflake | $4.68 billion | 24.78 | -$1.33 billion | ($3.18) | -105.30 |
| Akamai Technologies | $4.21 billion | 3.60 | $452.03 million | $2.78 | 37.92 |
Akamai Technologies has lower revenue, but higher earnings than Snowflake. Snowflake is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Akamai Technologies, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.
Insider and Institutional Ownership
65.1% of Snowflake shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 94.3% of Akamai Technologies shares are owned by institutional investors. 4.8% of Snowflake shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 2.3% of Akamai Technologies shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.
Summary
Akamai Technologies beats Snowflake on 8 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.
About Snowflake
Snowflake Inc. provides a cloud-based data platform for various organizations in the United States and internationally. Its platform offers Data Cloud, which enables customers to consolidate data into a single source of truth to drive meaningful business insights, build data-driven applications, and share data and data products, as well as applies artificial intelligence (AI) for solving business problems. The company was formerly known as Snowflake Computing, Inc. and changed its name to Snowflake Inc. in April 2019. Snowflake Inc. was incorporated in 2012 and is based in Bozeman, Montana.
About Akamai Technologies
Akamai Technologies, Inc. provides cloud computing, security, and content delivery services in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud solutions to keep infrastructure, websites, applications, application programming interfaces, and users safe from various cyberattacks and online threats while enhancing performance. It also provides web and mobile performance solutions to enable dynamic websites and applications; media delivery solutions, including video streaming and video player services, game and software delivery, broadcast operations, authoritative domain name system, resolution, and data and analytics; and cloud computing services, such as compute, storage, networking, database, and container management services to build, deploy, and secure applications and workloads. In addition, the company offers content delivery solutions; and an array of service and support to assist customers with integrating, configuring, optimizing, and managing its offerings. It sells its solutions through various channel partners. Akamai Technologies, Inc. was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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