Financial Review: Fastly (NASDAQ:FSLY) and VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET)

Fastly (NASDAQ:FSLY) and VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) are both technology companies, but which is the better stock? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their dividends, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, risk, valuation, earnings and profitability.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and recommmendations for Fastly and VNET Group, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Fastly	2	5	7	1	2.47
VNET Group	1	1	4	0	2.50

Fastly presently has a consensus price target of $27.42, suggesting a potential upside of 9.67%. VNET Group has a consensus price target of $16.90, suggesting a potential upside of 276.34%. Given VNET Group’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe VNET Group is more favorable than Fastly.

Profitability

This table compares Fastly and VNET Group’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Fastly	-11.80%	-6.31%	-4.04%
VNET Group	-22.29%	-36.25%	-4.43%

Insider and Institutional Ownership

79.7% of Fastly shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 72.8% of VNET Group shares are held by institutional investors. 4.2% of Fastly shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 12.1% of VNET Group shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Risk & Volatility

Fastly has a beta of 0.31, meaning that its stock price is 69% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, VNET Group has a beta of 0.23, meaning that its stock price is 77% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Fastly and VNET Group”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Fastly	$624.02 million	6.38	-$121.68 million	($0.53)	-47.17
VNET Group	$1.42 billion	0.85	-$36.01 million	($1.42)	-3.16

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

Summary

Fastly beats VNET Group on 9 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Fastly

Fastly, Inc. operates an edge cloud platform for processing, serving, and securing its customer's applications in the United States, the Asia Pacific, Europe, and internationally. The edge cloud is a category of Infrastructure as a Service that enables developers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences at the edge of the internet. The company offers network services to speed up and optimize the delivery of web and application traffic; device detection and geolocation; content delivery network, such as dynamic site acceleration, origin shield, instant purge, surrogate keys, programmatic control, content compression, reliability features, fanout, domainr, privacy, and modern protocols and performance services; and video/ streaming solutions and services, including live streaming, video on demand, and media shield. It also provides security solutions, such as DDoS protection, next-gen WAF, bot management, API and ATO protection, advanced rate limiting, and compliance services; load balancing; image optimization; transport layer security (TLS), platform TLS, and certainly; and origin connect. It serves customers operating in digital publishing, media and entertainment, technology, online education, travel and hospitality, and financial services industries. The company was formerly known as SkyCache, Inc. and changed its name to Fastly, Inc. in May 2012. Fastly, Inc. was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About VNET Group

VNET Group, Inc., an investment holding company, provides hosting and related services in China. It offers managed hosting services consisting of managed retail services, such as colocation services that dedicate data center space to house customers' servers and networking equipment, as well as allow customers to lease partial or entire cabinets for their servers; interconnectivity services that allow customers to connect their servers; value-added services, including hybrid IT, bare metal, firewall, server load balancing, data backup and recovery, data center management, server management, and backup server services; cloud services that allow customers to run applications over the internet using IT infrastructure; and VPN Services that extend customers' private networks by setting up connections through the public internet. The company also provides server administration services, such as operating system support and assistance with updates, server monitoring, server backup and restoration, server security evaluation, firewall services, and disaster recovery services. It serves information technology and cloud services, communications and social networking, gaming and entertainment, e-commerce, automobile, financial services, and blue-chip and small-to-mid-sized enterprises; government agencies; individuals; and telecommunication carriers. The company was formerly known as 21Vianet Group, Inc. and changed its name to VNET Group, Inc. in October 2021. VNET Group, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.