Financial Contrast: Backblaze (BLZE) and Its Peers

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) is one of 273 publicly-traded companies in the “IT Services” industry, but how does it compare to its peers? We will compare Backblaze to related businesses based on the strength of its dividends, valuation, risk, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, earnings and profitability.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Backblaze and its peers gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Net Income	Price/Earnings Ratio
Backblaze	$156.30 million	N/A	-26.76
Backblaze Competitors	$1.51 billion	$42.29 million	-34.44

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

Profitability

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

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Backblaze	N/A	N/A	N/A
Backblaze Competitors	-242.58%	-40.39%	-9.50%

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for Backblaze and its peers, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Backblaze	1	1	8	0	2.70
Backblaze Competitors	1979	5633	9402	345	2.47

Backblaze presently has a consensus price target of $19.71, indicating a potential upside of 116.64%. As a group, “IT Services” companies have a potential upside of 16.60%. Given Backblaze’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Backblaze is more favorable than its peers.

Risk and Volatility

Backblaze has a beta of 1.56, meaning that its stock price is 56% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Backblaze’s peers have a beta of 2.37, meaning that their average stock price is 137% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

54.0% of Backblaze shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 36.7% of shares of all “IT Services” companies are held by institutional investors. 4.2% of Backblaze shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 20.5% of shares of all “IT Services” companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Summary

Backblaze beats its peers on 8 of the 12 factors compared.

Backblaze Company Profile

Backblaze, Inc., a storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect data in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud services through a web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. It also provides Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. This service is offered as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and serves use cases, such as public, hybrid, and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive, and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and Internet of Things. In addition, the company offers Backblaze Computer Backup that automatically backs up data from laptops and desktops for businesses and individuals, which provides a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service and serves use cases, including computer backup, ransomware protection, theft and loss protection, and remote access. It serves the public cloud IaaS storage and Data-Protection-as-a-Service markets. The company was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California.