Head-To-Head Survey: Cheetah Mobile (NYSE:CMCM) and N-able (NYSE:NABL)

Cheetah Mobile (NYSE:CMCM) and N-able (NYSE:NABL) are both small-cap technology companies, but which is the better business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, earnings, risk, dividends, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership and valuation.

Volatility and Risk

Cheetah Mobile has a beta of 1.87, suggesting that its share price is 87% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, N-able has a beta of 0.49, suggesting that its share price is 51% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Cheetah Mobile and N-able”s top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Cheetah Mobile	$164.51 million	0.49	-$36.85 million	($1.51)	-1.75
N-able	$511.43 million	1.48	-$18.82 million	($0.02)	-200.75

N-able has higher revenue and earnings than Cheetah Mobile. N-able is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Cheetah Mobile, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares Cheetah Mobile and N-able’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Cheetah Mobile	-28.11%	-8.54%	-3.22%
N-able	-0.88%	3.55%	2.04%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings and recommmendations for Cheetah Mobile and N-able, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Cheetah Mobile	1	0	0	0	1.00
N-able	2	4	2	0	2.00

N-able has a consensus target price of $5.08, suggesting a potential upside of 26.53%. Given N-able’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe N-able is more favorable than Cheetah Mobile.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

0.4% of Cheetah Mobile shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 96.3% of N-able shares are held by institutional investors. 17.1% of Cheetah Mobile shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 2.0% of N-able shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Summary

N-able beats Cheetah Mobile on 11 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Cheetah Mobile

Cheetah Mobile Inc. along with its subsidiaries, engages in provision of internet services, artificial intelligence, and other services in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Japan, and internationally. The company's internet products include Duba Anti-virus, an internet security application to protect users against known and unknown security threats and malicious applications; and Clean Master, a junk file cleaning, memory boosting, and privacy protection tool for mobile devices. It also offers value-added products, such as PC and mobile products, as well as wallpaper, office optimization software, and others; E-Coupon vending robot, a delivery and reception robot, which includes marketing campaigns and services; and multi-cloud management platform and overseas advertising agency service. In addition, the company provides mobile advertising services; duba.com personal start page that aggregates online resources and provides users access to their online destinations, such as online shopping, video, online game, travel, and local information; artificial intelligence and other services; and premium membership services. It serves mobile advertising networks and partners, e-commerce companies, mobile application developers, and mobile game developers, as well as individual customers. The company was formerly known as Kingsoft Internet Software Holdings Limited and changed its name to Cheetah Mobile Inc. in March 2014. Cheetah Mobile Inc. was incorporated in 2009 and is based in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.

About N-able

N-able, Inc. provides cloud-based software solutions for managed service providers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and internationally. The company's solutions enable MSPs to support digital transformation and growth within small and medium-sized enterprises. It provides software platform designed to be an integrated, enterprise-grade solution that serves as an operating system for its MSP partners and scales as their businesses grow. In addition, the company offers remote monitoring and management solutions provide MSP partners with visibility and insights into the availability and performance of their customers' networks, infrastructure, devices and applications through a centralized dashboard; data protection as-a-service solutions, such as backup and disaster recovery for servers, virtual machines, workstations, files, data, and key cloud-based applications, as well as multi-tenant platform and secure remote delivery architecture. Further, it offers security services through patch management, endpoint security, managed detection and response, web protection, e-mail security, and archiving and vulnerability assessment solutions. Additionally, the company engages in professional services automation, automation and scripting management, password management policies and reporting, and analytics. N-able, Inc. was incorporated in 2020 and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.