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Stock comparison: Snowflake vs Palantir

Snowflake vs Palantir
Categories Investing

This blog post is a practical application of the ultimate guide that we have created on how to to analyze a stock, which can also be downloaded as a free eBook.

If you have not read the guide yet, you should do so, but since in the world of investing practice is much more important than theory, we wanted to take it a step further and show you how to apply the knowledge from the guide in practice.

After all, you can’t learn to swim by just reading about swimming.

We decided to take two technology stocks (outside of the FAANG scope – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix Google), and analyze them using exactly the same methodology presented in the guide.

We’ll go through how to gather information and then analyze the selected stocks through four main aspects:

  • Understanding the Company
  • Fundamental Analysis (Financials and Valuations)
  • The Piotroski F-Score
  • Market Sentiment and News

Please note that this article was last updated in June 2022. The numbers might have changed if you read this article at a later date, however, you can still follow the same process of analysis (and improve it according to your own research style) using the latest data and different stocks of your choice.

As you might imagine, this content is not investment advice, but rather just an educational article about how to gather information and read financial statements. It is also not an invitation to buy or sell any financial instrument mentioned in the content.

1. Gathering the information

The first step when analyzing a stock is to gather all the intel in one place. Searching for the right documents, arranging them and separating the wheat from the chaff can take quite a lot of time.

For our research purposes, we sought information on the following sites:

  • The respective company’s websites
  • SEC EDGAR – For 10-K and 10-Q reports and yearly reports
  • Uncle Stock – For fundamental analysis and the Piotroski score
  • Trading view – For technical analysis
  • JustETF – For ETF holdings of stock
  • Dataroma – Portfolio updates of institutional investors and insider transactions
  • Investing.com – For news, ideas, and professional analysts’ opinions
  • Social media, Reddit, blog posts, etc. – For news, ideas, and professional analysts’ opinions

We haven’t included all the resources and screenshots here in this blog post, otherwise this already long article would be even longer. So, if you would like to browse more interesting resources for investors, please check out our article: The 100 best websites for investors.

You must be eager to know which two stocks we have chosen so, here they are:

  • Snowflake
  • Palantir

Why have we chosen these two stocks? As you’ve probably heard, data is the new oil. These two companies are providing the infrastructure for data to be stored and processed.

As the saying goes: ”During a gold rush, sell the shovels”, something that these two companies have taken to heart and which gives them a very bright future.

Both companies are competitors in terms of AI-fueled data warehousing tools (they both create software tools that allow enterprises to derive data-driven insights) but have a different approach to the challenge.

Both stocks can be considered growth stocks, since their revenues are increasing fast, but on the other hand, both companies are still not profitable (based on the annual data for 2021).

At the moment of writing this blog post, tech stocks have suffered a huge hit, which provides an additional argument as to why Snowflake and Palantir might be a good buy.

2. Understanding the business

Understanding the business is about knowing what you are investing in, not only from a security perspective (for more, read our article on the different types of investments), but in terms of actually understanding the business; namely how they create value from shareholders.

In the scope of understanding the business, it makes sense to analyze the following factors:

  • Market capitalization
  • The business model and products
  • A competitive advantage
  • Future growth plans
  • Weaknesses and threads
  • Management
  • Corporate governance
  • Earnings date

If you would like to learn more about the factors listed above, please refer to our ultimate guide on How to analyze a stock.

2.1. The market

Every company is becoming not only a software company, but also a data company. Data is the new oil. To extract value from big data you need Data Warehousing Tools.

These tools are used to perform various operations on a large volume of data, such as collecting, reading, writing, and migrating large amounts of data from different sources.

The global data warehousing market size was valued at $21.18 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach $51.18 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 10.7%. Nevertheless, the market is already crowded, and companies need a real competitive advantage (“moat”) to dominate the market. Below is a good overview of the whole market:

Source: Matt Truck

Palantir and Snowflake are both considered Data Warehousing Tools. They offer unique methods for interacting with large, non-relational data sets. While Palantir uses private operating system models (a specialized solution), Snowflake offers a more conventional, cloud-based warehousing approach (a general solution).

If you are not a tech person, here’s a nice description from Reddit of the difference between the products (source):

A company [Snowflake] has lots of data in different departments. This company has analysts and other users that work with that data. Instead of having to buy servers and software to store, access, and analyze data, the company can just use Snowflake as a data warehouse service which also has some analytical capabilities.

Palantir doesn’t really serve to provide generalized cloud data storage, compute, or access. Palantir’s goal is to gather data (much more broadly than Snowflake from almost any source) in order to help to make relationships between the data to come to a decision/conclusion (much more deeply than Snowflake).

Palantir software could be used to analyze data on Snowflake (plus any data source missed by Snowflake), but Snowflake would not/could not be useful on Palantir.

Now let’s take a closer look at the websites of both companies.

2.2. Snowflake

Source: Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse company. Snowflake provides data cloud platforms for customers in data engineering, data lake, data warehousing, data science, data applications, and data storage solutions that are entirely separate from other non-relational data technologies.

With Snowflake, organizations can use a large number of third-party integrations and programming languages to analyze and control their data.

Their IPO was one of the biggest in history, raising $3,4B. They have more than 5.000 customers and around 30 % of Fortune 500 companies use their product. Snowflake has become invaluable in the data and cloud-computing market.

For more information, please make sure to read the  company’s 10K and 10Q.

Source: TradingView

We’ll look closely at their financial performance later, but at this point we just want to get a general overview of the business. As you can see above, the market capitalization of Snowflake is $43B, they have almost 4.000 employees, and they are making a loss of $680m, with $1,2B in revenue.

Source: TradingView

What’s more interesting is that the SNOW stock price collapsed with all tech/growth stocks in the past few months, going from an all time high of $405 to $112 and now trading around $113. The stock is almost 4-times cheaper than it was less than a year ago, the 1-year change being – 53 %. That’s the first signal that the stock might be a good buy, assuming that the underlying business is sound.

2.3. Palantir

Source: Palantir

Palantir was founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel, founder and former chief executive officer of Paypal, who is sometimes referred to as the “don” of the PayPal Mafia. Palantir began as a company that worked for government institutions, with the specific goal of preventing terrorism.

In general, Palantir’s product is software that aggregates data from different sources to perform data analytics by applying advanced machine algorithms. Their mission is to provide software to empower organizations to effectively integrate their data, decisions, and operations at scale. Their product performs integration, analysis and visualization of data.

They offer three platforms on the market:

  • Palantir Gotham –  a niche product targeting government agencies, such as military, defense agencies, the CIA, etc. The software can identify hard-to-detect patterns in data sets being used as intelligence signals. The output of the software can be used to plan responses to terrorist threats.
  • Palantir Foundry – a mass product, the idea being to create a central operating system for the data of any organization. Users of the Palantir Foundry can integrate, analyze, and visualize data in one place.
  • Palantir Apollo – Apollo is s a continuous delivery system that powers Palantir SaaS platforms in nearly any environment. It’s a cloud-agnostic, single control layer that coordinates ongoing delivery of new features, security updates, and platform configurations.

It’s also worth mentioning from their 10K 2021 report that out of the $1.5 billion in revenue that was generated in 2021, 58% came from customers in the governmental sector, and 42% came from customers in the commercial sector. 57% of Palantir’s revenue was earned from customers in the United States, and 43% from those abroad.

With Palantir Foundry, the company plans to expand to mass market, since their growth was limited through targeting only niche markets. By expanding into the general market, Palantir will likely have to pay the price of sacrificing an important part of its competitive advantage to compete in a crowded market and achieve scale in the commercial market.

For more information, please make sure to read the company’s 10K and 10Q.

Source: Tradingview

Palantir’s market capitalization is $18.8B, they have around 2.900 employees and are making a loss of $520m with $1,54B in revenue. They have higher revenue than Snowflake, smaller losses, and fewer employees. They were founded in 2003 and are still not profitable. Their market capitalization is much lower than that one of Snowflake.

Source: TradingView

The stock price of Palantir also basically collapsed. It went from $29.29 to $6.44 in 52-week range and now trades around $7.9. The stock is almost 3-times cheaper as it was less than a year ago, and the 1-year change is – 68 %.

2.4. Business comparison

In USDSnowflakePalantir
Market Cap43 B18.7 B
Enterprise value50 B25.6 B
Revenue1.2 B1.5 B
Profit– 680 m– 520 m
Number of employees3.9922.920
Number of customers5.000 +200 +
Stock price$113 (drop from $405)$8 (drop from $29)
Founded20122003
Business modelPure SaaSTransition to SaaS

If we compare both companies, Snowflake’s market capitalization is almost twice as big. The Enterprise value, I.e., how much money would be needed to buy the whole company and pay off all its debt (market cap + debt – cash and cash equivalents) of Snowflake is also twice as much as Palantir’s.

The main reasons for such a difference in market capitalization are as follows:

  • Palantir tries to overcome their limits selling to government agencies. The number of those is orders of magnitude lower compared to the medium-sized and large businesses that Snow is targeting).
  • An additional reason is the long sales cycle with Palantir, since they have to go through lengthy administrative process to be selected as a provider of software for governments. But on the other hand, such revenue is more reliable as governments don’t change their supplier often.
  • Institutional investors in the IPO.
  • Snowflake is considered a software (SaaS) company, and Palantir is considered a consulting company with engineers, making the transitionto a software company.
  • Snowflake has faster revenue growth.

It’s a signal to deeply analyze:

  • Strategy and market potential
  • Further growth plans
  • Revenue trends – YOY growth
  • Customer acquisition costs
  • Net income trends (lowering losses)
  • Debt to equity structure, debt trends
  • Cash and cash flows

Both stocks witnessed a significant drop and are at the moment more than 3-times cheaper than they were the previous few months.  Nevertheless, they can’t be categorized as value stocks, since they are not profitable and invest heavily in their growth, meaning they are typical growth stocks.

That means we also have to thoroughly analyze their growth plans and how much room is left on the market. With growth stocks the analysis is focused more on their potential future performance.

3. Fundamental analysis – financials and valuations

In the scope of fundamental analysis, it makes sense to analyze the following factors:

  • Balance sheet
  • Income statement
  • Cash flow statement
  • Valuation & Investment attractiveness

If you would like to learn more about the factors listed above, please refer to our ultimate guide on How to analyze a stock.

3.1. Snowflake

The table above shows selected values from the company’s balance sheet and income statement. What we can say from those numbers is:

  • The company has good current and quick ratios, meaning liquidity is good.
  • The revenue of the company is growing super-fast at more than 100 % per annum, and last year the company made 1,22 billion $ in revenues.
  • The company is still not profitable, making higher and higher losses every year.
  • Operating cash-flow can be considered healthy.

And now let’s focus on valuation metrics. Since the company is making a loss, many valuation metrics can’t be calculated (P/E, EV/EBIT, PEG etc.). Nevertheless, we can rely on some numbers:

  • Enterprise Value tells us how much money would be needed to buy the whole company and pay off all its debt. The enterprise value is currently 39 billion $.
  • P/B is irrelevant for companies that don’t have a lot of tangible assets like a factory does.
  • P/S ratio is constantly falling and was 28.40, which is considered high.

3.2. Palantir

The situation with Palantir is pretty much the same as with Snowflake.

  • The company has good current and quick ratios, meaning liquidity is good.
  • Debt is not a problem for the company, meaning they have enough equity capital.
  • The company’s revenue is growing slower than Snowflakes, at around 40 %, nevertheless, revenue reached 1,54 billion dollars, which is more than Snowflake’s.
  • As with Snowflake, the company is still not profitable but losses were decreasing until the most recent data.
  • Operating cash-flow can be considered healthy from the last year.

As with Snowflake, we have a similar situation here. Since the company is making a loss, many valuation metrics can’t be calculated (P/E, EV/BIT, PEG etc.). Nevertheless, there are some numbers we can rely on:

  • The enterprise value is considered to be 16 billion $, which is less than Snowflake.
  • P/S ratio was 10.79 which is better than Snowflake.

3.3. Comparison

Comparing financial statements and valuation metrics, we can say that Snowflake is growing more aggressively. Their revenues are growing faster, and they are on the way to catching Palantir. Their enterprise value is also higher. But the growth of the company comes at the cost of higher losses. Palantir is better in this regard, decreasing their losses in the past few years.

Since there’s a big difference in the enterprise value, we advised looking closely at cash and debt structure. In table below are data for the most recent quarter or trailing twelve months. As we can see, Snowflake has more cash (especially per share) and less debt, but the biggest difference in EV is really market capitalization.

In USD (mrq or ttm)SnowflakePalantir
Market cap43 B18.7 B
Revenue1.41 B1.65 B
Profit / Loss-642 M-498 M
Cash3.8 B2.52 B
Cash per share11.991.23
Debt / Equity3.78 %11.32 %
Total debt206.55 M267.66 M
BV per share17.171.16
P/S28.4010.79

4. The Piotroski F-score

The Piotroski F-score is one of the most popular methods used by value investors to score the stocks. This method considers the 9 fundamental metrics of a healthy business.

For each “yes” at each metric, the company gets 1 point. Companies with a score above 8 are considered fundamentally good, companies between 5 and 8 can be considered good companies, and care should be taken with companies that have a score below 5.

If you would like to learn more about the Piotroski F-score, please refer to our ultimate guide on How to analyze a stock.

4.1. Snowflake

As you can see above, Snowflake’s score was 6.38 for the year 2021 and has been improving over years. It’s not an ideal score, but still high enough to be considered as a solid investment if other factors are counted in. The biggest issue is that the company is still not profitable, although revenue is growing fast.

4.2. Palantir

Palantir’s score for the year 2021 was similar to Snowflakes at 6.48. Based on the latest quarterly results, they improved by 1 whole point. As with Snowflake, the biggest issue is profitability.

4.3. Comparison

When comparing Snowflake and Palantir based on the F-score, Palantir is considered a slightly better investment. 

 SnowflakePalantir
F-Score67

5. Market sentiment and news

In the scope of market sentiment and news, it makes sense to analyze the following factors:

  • Put/Call Ratio
  • Institutional holdings
  • The ETF’s exposure
  • Beating / Missing expected earnings
  • Analysts’ rating consensus
  • Social sentiment
  • Recent company news

If you would like to learn more about the factors listed above, please refer to our ultimate guide on How to analyze a stock.

5.1. Snowflake

Source: WeBull

Source: Investing.com

WeBull shows a nice summary of different analysts’ ratings. As we can see above, the sentiment is leaning strongly to the “buy” side. There is a pretty similar sentiment among the aggregated analysts’ opinions on investing.com.

Source: WeBull

Source: Investing.com

The picture above shows that the stock is very interesting for institutional investors. More than 900 institutional investors own more than 68 % of the company. There’s an increase in institutional holdings, which is a good sign. And as we can see, the company is owned by some of the best institutional investors such as Berkshire Hathaway, Tiger Global Management, Vanguard, Morgan Stanley and others.

Source: WeBull

One more important sentiment is how the company meets the expectation of investors, especially in terms of earnings. As we can see above, Snowflake beat the EPS expectations for the last four quarters.

5.2. Palantir

Source: WeBull

Source: Investing.com

Analysts’ consensus for Palantir is not as good as for Snowflake, but still, it doesn’t lean towards selling the stock, but rather keeping it if you already own it. We can say that the overall sentiment is still bullish, but that the company’s stock price has the potential to grow.

Source: WeBull

Source: Investing.com

As with Snowflake, Palantir is owned by reputable institutional holdings. The institutional holdings are a little bit lower at around 32 %, and the value of share ownership decreased, which is interesting.

The main reason for the stock being less attractive than Snowflake at the moment is shown nicely by the photo above. The company missed EPS expectations in the last few quarters. That doesn’t mean a stock is not interesting: expectations might sometimes be too high, or a company could have faced a temporary setback (that’s something to explore in this case).  

5.3. Comparison

Both stocks have strong institutional holdings. The market sentiment leans towards Snowflake, especially because of strong revenue and market share growth.

 SnowflakePalantir
Institutional holdingsStrongerStrong
Analysts’ opinionBuyHold
Meeting recent EPS expectationsYesNo

6. Conclusion

Now let’s look at the conclusion on how the companies compare in terms of investment attractiveness.

In USDSnowflakePalantir
Market cap43 B18.7 B
Enterprise value50 B25.6 B
Revenue1.41 B1.65 B
YOY Revenue growthcca. 100 %cca. 40 %
Profit / Loss-642 M-498 M
Cash3.8 B2.52 B
Debt / Equity3.78 %11.32 %
Total debt206.55 M267.66 M
BV per share17.171.16
P/S28.4010.79
Piotroski F-Score67
Institutional holdingsStrongerStrong
Analysts’ opinionBuyHold
Technical analysisBuy (a little stronger)Buy
Meeting EPS ExpectationsYesNo
Number of employees3.9922.920
Number of customers5.000 +200 +
Stock price$113 (drop from $405)$8 (drop from $29)
Founded20122003
Business modelPure SaaSTransition to SaaS

Since growth stocks have been hit hard in the past couple of months, some investors find both companies attractive at these valuations.

Both companies have low leverage, meaning lower interest rates won’t directly impact cash flows in a big way. On the other hand, if there is another market correction in the following months, both stocks will probably take an additional hit.

PS: The content above is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. The data presented above will change over time and the content might not be updated with those changes. Investing in stocks is risky, since investors can lose their invested capital.