Bridgeline Digital (BLIN) & Its Peers Critical Analysis

Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN) is one of 953 public companies in the “Software” industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its peers? We will compare Bridgeline Digital to similar companies based on the strength of its dividends, valuation, profitability, earnings, risk, institutional ownership and analyst recommendations.

Risk & Volatility

Bridgeline Digital has a beta of 1.05, meaning that its share price is 5% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Bridgeline Digital’s peers have a beta of 1.34, meaning that their average share price is 34% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of current ratings for Bridgeline Digital and its peers, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Bridgeline Digital	1	1	1	0	2.00
Bridgeline Digital Competitors	5730	21457	44750	1492	2.57

Bridgeline Digital presently has a consensus target price of $4.62, suggesting a potential upside of 521.80%. As a group, “Software” companies have a potential upside of 26.45%. Given Bridgeline Digital’s higher possible upside, research analysts clearly believe Bridgeline Digital is more favorable than its peers.

Profitability

This table compares Bridgeline Digital and its peers’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Bridgeline Digital	-8.65%	-14.51%	-8.76%
Bridgeline Digital Competitors	-612.69%	20.88%	-8.98%

Institutional & Insider Ownership

15.1% of Bridgeline Digital shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 41.8% of shares of all “Software” companies are held by institutional investors. 27.5% of Bridgeline Digital shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 19.9% of shares of all “Software” companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Bridgeline Digital and its peers gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Net Income	Price/Earnings Ratio
Bridgeline Digital	$15.38 million	-$2.52 million	-6.19
Bridgeline Digital Competitors	$1.81 billion	$385.92 million	109.81

Bridgeline Digital’s peers have higher revenue and earnings than Bridgeline Digital. Bridgeline Digital is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than its peers, indicating that it is currently more affordable than other companies in its industry.

Summary

Bridgeline Digital peers beat Bridgeline Digital on 9 of the 13 factors compared.

Bridgeline Digital Company Profile

Bridgeline Digital, Inc. operates as a marketing technology company in the United States, Canada, and internationally. The company offers HawkSearch, a site search, recommendation, and personalization application for marketers, merchandisers, and developers; Celebros Search, a commerce-oriented site search product that provides natural language processing with artificial intelligence; and Woorank, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit tool that generates an instant performance audit of the site's technical, on-page, and off-page SEO. It also provides Bridgeline TruPresence, a web content management and eCommerce platform to support the needs of multi-unit organizations and franchises; Bridgeline Unbound, a technology suite that empower marketers to easily manage their digital experiences and create personalized customer journeys; and OrchestraCMS, a digital experience platform that enables development of custom solutions, third-party integrations, and delivery of digital transformation initiatives on the Salesforce platform. In addition, the company offers digital engagement services comprising digital strategy, web design and web development, usability engineering, information architecture, and SEO, as well as hosting services. It serves vertical markets, such as industrial distributors and wholesalers, franchises and enterprises, manufacturers, eCommerce retailers, health services and life sciences, technology, credit unions and banks, and associations and foundations through its direct sales force. The company was formerly known as Bridgeline Software, Inc. Bridgeline Digital, Inc. was incorporated in 2000 and is based in Woburn, Massachusetts.