Contrasting IQVIA (NYSE:IQV) & Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ:TWST)

IQVIA (NYSE:IQV) and Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ:TWST) are both large-cap healthcare companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, profitability, risk, institutional ownership, valuation, dividends and earnings.

Profitability

This table compares IQVIA and Twist Bioscience’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
IQVIA	8.10%	30.25%	6.54%
Twist Bioscience	-31.66%	-28.64%	-19.94%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent recommendations for IQVIA and Twist Bioscience, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
IQVIA	0	3	13	1	2.88
Twist Bioscience	2	2	8	0	2.50

IQVIA presently has a consensus price target of $248.00, indicating a potential downside of 7.01%. Twist Bioscience has a consensus price target of $103.00, indicating a potential downside of 38.32%. Given IQVIA’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities research analysts plainly believe IQVIA is more favorable than Twist Bioscience.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

89.6% of IQVIA shares are held by institutional investors. 1.7% of IQVIA shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 3.1% of Twist Bioscience shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Volatility & Risk

IQVIA has a beta of 1.18, suggesting that its share price is 18% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Twist Bioscience has a beta of 2.22, suggesting that its share price is 122% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares IQVIA and Twist Bioscience”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
IQVIA	$16.31 billion	2.69	$1.36 billion	$8.06	33.09
Twist Bioscience	$376.57 million	27.81	-$77.67 million	($2.22)	-75.22

IQVIA has higher revenue and earnings than Twist Bioscience. Twist Bioscience is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than IQVIA, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

IQVIA beats Twist Bioscience on 12 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About IQVIA

IQVIA Holdings Inc. engages in the provision of advanced analytics, technology solutions, and clinical research services to the life sciences industry in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. It operates through three segments: Technology & Analytics Solutions, Research & Development Solutions, and Contract Sales & Medical Solutions. The Technology & Analytics Solutions segment offers a range of cloud-based applications and related implementation services; real world solutions that enable life sciences and provider customers to generate and disseminate evidence, which informs health care decision making and improves patients’ outcomes; and strategic and implementation consulting services, such as advanced analytics and commercial processes outsourcing services. This segment also provides country level performance metrics related to sales of pharmaceutical products, prescribing trends, medical treatment, and promotional activity across various channels, including retail, hospital, and mail order; and measurement of sales or prescribing activity at the regional, zip code, and individual prescriber level. The Research & Development Solutions segment offers project management and clinical monitoring; clinical trial support; strategic planning and design services; and patient and site centric solutions, as well as central laboratory, genomic, bioanalytical, ADME, discovery, and vaccine and biomarker laboratory services. The Contract Sales & Medical Solutions segment provides health care provider and patient engagement services, and scientific strategy and medical affairs services. It serves pharmaceutical, biotechnology, device and diagnostic, and consumer health companies. The company has a collaboration with argenx SE. The company was formerly known as Quintiles IMS Holdings, Inc. and changed its name to IQVIA Holdings Inc. in November 2017. The company is headquartered in Durham, North Carolina.

About Twist Bioscience

Twist Bioscience Corporation engages in the manufacture and sale of synthetic DNA-based products. The company offers synthetic genes and gene fragments used in product development for therapeutics, diagnostics, chemicals/materials, food/agriculture, data storage, and various applications within academic research by biotech, pharma, industrial chemical, and agricultural companies, as well as academic labs; Oligo pools used in targeted NGS, CRISPR gene editing, mutagenesis experiments, DNA origami, DNA computing, data storage in DNA, and other applications; and immunoglobulin G proteins for customers focused on the pursuit of drug discovery and development. It also provides NGS tools comprising library preparation kits, human exome kits, and fixed and custom panels, as well as alliance panels, primarily used within diagnostic tests for various indications, population genetics research and biomarker discovery, translational research, microbiology, and applied markets research; and methylation detection kits for cancer, and rare and inherited disease study, as well as fast hybridization and full RNA sequencing workflow solution. In addition, the company provides synthetic SARS-CoV-2 RNA reference sequences as positive controls for the development of both NGS and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction assays; synthetic monkeypox controls; and various respiratory viral controls, including for influenzas, respiratory syncytial virus, rhinoviruses, SARS, MERS, and coronaviruses. Further, it offers SARS-CoV-2 Research Panels, such as the Twist Respiratory Virus Panel and the Pan-Viral Research Panel, for the detection of disease in a research setting; precision DNA libraries used for antibody engineering, affinity maturation, and humanization; and antibody optimization solution to enable simultaneous optimization of multiple characteristics of a given antibody. The company was incorporated in 2013 and is headquartered in South San Francisco, California.