AZN vs. NVS, ABBV, ABT, MRK, PFE, NVO, SNY, GSK, MRNA, and TAK
Should you be buying AstraZeneca stock or one of its competitors? The main competitors of AstraZeneca include Novartis (NVS), AbbVie (ABBV), Abbott Laboratories (ABT), Merck & Co., Inc. (MRK), Pfizer (PFE), Novo Nordisk A/S (NVO), Sanofi (SNY), GSK (GSK), Moderna (MRNA), and Takeda Pharmaceutical (TAK). These companies are all part of the "medical" sector.
AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN) and Novartis (NYSE:NVS) are both large-cap medical companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their institutional ownership, profitability, analyst recommendations, media sentiment, earnings, community ranking, risk, valuation and dividends.
Novartis has a net margin of 33.76% compared to AstraZeneca's net margin of 13.30%. Novartis' return on equity of 34.56% beat AstraZeneca's return on equity.
AstraZeneca has a beta of 0.45, meaning that its share price is 55% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Novartis has a beta of 0.57, meaning that its share price is 43% less volatile than the S&P 500.
AstraZeneca presently has a consensus target price of $88.00, suggesting a potential upside of 11.38%. Novartis has a consensus target price of $118.13, suggesting a potential upside of 7.46%. Given AstraZeneca's stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities research analysts plainly believe AstraZeneca is more favorable than Novartis.
Novartis received 471 more outperform votes than AstraZeneca when rated by MarketBeat users. Likewise, 61.37% of users gave Novartis an outperform vote while only 59.79% of users gave AstraZeneca an outperform vote.
AstraZeneca pays an annual dividend of $1.93 per share and has a dividend yield of 2.5%. Novartis pays an annual dividend of $2.43 per share and has a dividend yield of 2.2%. AstraZeneca pays out 94.6% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. Novartis pays out 32.8% of its earnings in the form of a dividend.
20.4% of AstraZeneca shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 13.1% of Novartis shares are held by institutional investors. 0.0% of Novartis shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.
Novartis has lower revenue, but higher earnings than AstraZeneca. Novartis is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than AstraZeneca, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.
In the previous week, AstraZeneca had 12 more articles in the media than Novartis. MarketBeat recorded 30 mentions for AstraZeneca and 18 mentions for Novartis. Novartis' average media sentiment score of 0.84 beat AstraZeneca's score of 0.82 indicating that Novartis is being referred to more favorably in the news media.
Summary
Novartis beats AstraZeneca on 11 of the 21 factors compared between the two stocks.
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This chart shows the number of new MarketBeat users adding AZN and its top 5 competitors to their watchlist. Each company is represented with a line over a 90 day period.
This chart shows the average media sentiment of NASDAQ and its competitors over the past 90 days as caculated by MarketBeat. The averaged score is equivalent to the following: Very Negative Sentiment <= -1.5, Negative Sentiment > -1.5 and <= -0.5, Neutral Sentiment > -0.5 and < 0.5, Positive Sentiment >= 0.5 and < 1.5, and Very Positive Sentiment >= 1.5.
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