Company Reports

Eaton manufactures mission-critical, highly engineered components designed to solve customer pain points in vital areas of the world’s infrastructure. A substantial portion of Eaton’s products are installed into customer operations and must be serviced or replaced at set intervals, which tends to carry higher margins than the sale of the equipment itself. Eaton boasts one of the largest global installed bases of electrical equipment, and trends such as rising regulatory standards for safety and efficiency, the reshoring of supply chains within the US, and an explosion in data generation and electrical system complexity are fueling its growth.

Gartner is many IT professionals’ go-to source for the latest industry insights. With over 2,400 experts and 13,000 customers, it's significantly larger than its direct competitors, which leads to economies of scale. In the IT research and advisory world, providing comprehensive coverage across different areas of interest requires the company to assemble a team of experts that comes with fixed salary expenses. However, the marginal cost of delivering an extra copy of the research report to a new client is close to zero. Therefore, when a company like Gartner has amassed a large customer base that can effectively spread out its fixed costs, the unit economics would look more attractive than those of its smaller counterparts. Over the past five years, Gartner has established a consistent margin advantage of at least 10 percentage points relative to its next-largest competitor. We expect this trend to continue, given Gartner’s unparalleled scale in IT research and advisory.

Williams owns the valuable Transco pipeline, which connects Texan and Appalachian natural gas to demand along the Gulf Coast, mid-Atlantic, and Northeast. As demand along the vital corridor is set to grow, investment will continue. We expect these investments to be productive and are underpinned by new utility and liquefied natural gas demand for natural gas.

With about 90% of Choice Hotels' US portfolio within one mile of an interstate, the company is positioned to benefit from US AI, onshoring, and infrastructure activity. Long term, we expect Choice to gradually expand room share in the hotel industry in the next decade, with its keys increasing more than 2% on average annually, above the 1%-2% supply lift we estimate for the US industry over that time. Room growth points to higher quality units, as Choice's pipeline is expected to generate revenue that is on average 70% above its existing base, and the company removed rooms in 2025 that produced 20% less revenue than the consolidated average. The expansion of its higher-scale and extended-stay portfolio stands to buoy the company’s brand intangible asset and switching cost advantages. Specifically, growth is supported by a rejuvenated Comfort brand (27% of 2025 total global rooms), the newer Everhome concept and extended-stay brand WoodSpring (6% combined), the acquisition of the higher-scale Radisson brand in 2022, new Canada and China franchise relationships in 2025, and a solid loyalty program with 78 million members as of Sept. 30, 2026, up from 44 million in 2019. Choice holds a 1.6% global hotel revenue share, ranking it eighth in the industry, and 5.6% US share, ranking it fourth in the industry.

Brunswick is a long-established manufacturer of pleasure boats and engines, operating under market-leading brands like Sea Ray and Mercury Marine. We believe a portfolio of innovative products has allowed Brunswick to capture consistent pricing power, supporting its brand intangible asset, which underpins our narrow moat rating. Bolstering its market leadership is an ability to meet evolving customer preferences through its autonomy, connectivity, electrification, and shared access, or ACES, strategy, which strives to elevate the user experience, cater to the electric products migration, and facilitate higher awareness through Freedom Boat Club.

Arizona's fast-growing population and new business activity combined with improving rate regulation in the state should give investors more confidence in Pinnacle West's earnings growth potential.

FirstEnergy's regulated utilities are focused on accelerating investments that should result in solid earnings growth.

Marriott's US demand is strong, helped by investment in AI, onshoring, and infrastructure spending. We expect demand for Marriott's brands to endure and for the hotelier's global share to increase further over the next several years. Marriott has strong intangible assets, the source of its wide moat, valued by both hotel owners and travelers. In the past few years, Marriott has added several new brands, which support our constructive stance. In fact, recent brands StudioRes, City Express, citizenM, and Four Points not only extend Marriott's reach into the midscale and extended-stay segments but could also add several hundred hotels each over the next several years. Additionally, in 2025, the company acquired citizenM, which added about 8,000 rooms. Further, we believe the 2023 partnership with MGM's Vegas portfolio has strengthened Marriott's long-term brand advantage, as MGM's leading presence in the gaming mecca complements Marriott's dominant position in North America. Also, we see Marriott as having an industry-leading loyalty program with more than 300 million members (as of Sept. 30, 2026), which incentivizes third-party hotel owners to join its brands.

We lowered Harley-Davidson’s moat to narrow from wide in 2024. We still see brand equity stemming from a long history of innovation, manufacturing experience, and a dealer network that has given Harley a dominant position in the US motorcycle market. However, we think its brand intangible advantage has declined in recent years, lowering our conviction in Harley’s ability to maintain market share and restore historical operating margin metrics, resulting in more tepid economic profits ahead.

Celanese is the world's largest producer of acetic acid and its chemical derivatives, including vinyl acetate monomer, or VAM, and emulsions. These commodity products are used to produce specialty engineered materials or sold externally. Celanese produces these chemicals in its acetyl chain segment, which generates a little less than half of companywide profits. This segment primarily serves the automotive, cigarette, coatings, building and construction, and medical end markets. Celanese's Clear Lake, Texas, plant benefits from a cost-advantaged feedstock from low-cost US natural gas. The company has expanded its acetic acid production capacity at Clear Lake in recent years to take advantage of the low-cost US natural gas-based feedstock, while also reducing capacity in other higher-cost regions. This should support segment margins as we expect US natural gas prices to remain well below natural gas prices in Europe, Asia, and Brent oil-based feedstock.

CSI Solar is a leading Chinese solar module producer. Known for its extensive overseas exposure, CSI generated 87% of its revenue from international markets in 2025, the highest among its Chinese peers.

As China’s largest duty-free and travel retail operator, China Tourism Group Duty Free has a substantial competitive edge because of its leading scale, solid relationship with suppliers, and first-mover advantage in Hainan province's offshore duty-free market. These allow it to become a key beneficiary of growing tourism demand and consumption in China thanks to its attractive product prices, enriched product variety, and extensive store network, which should bode well for the firm's long-term growth outlook.

Jinko Solar, a global leader in the solar industry, shipped 87 gigawatts, or GW, of solar modules in 2025, securing its top position worldwide. Jinko is highly self-sufficient, producing solar wafers internally to manufacture solar cells, which are then assembled into solar modules.

Ball is the world's largest producer of aluminum beverage cans. Used primarily for carbonated soft drinks and beer, aluminum cans are historically a low-growth industry but one with favorable competitive dynamics for incumbents. Ball became the world’s largest producer of aluminum beverage cans in 2016 with its sizable acquisition of Rexam. As a condition of the acquisition, Ball was required to divest eight aluminum can plants in the United States. These assets were sold to Ball’s competitor, Ardagh. Since the acquisition, Ball has divested from specific industries (such as steel food and aerosol containers) and regions (China) to focus on producing aluminum cans in markets where it can earn strong economic profits.

Trina Solar is one of the four largest Chinese solar module producers. Like its competitors, Trina embraced a vertically integrated model covering wafer, cell, and module production. However, it maintains the lowest level of vertical integration among its leading competitors. By maintaining a smaller solar wafer capacity, Trina retains the flexibility to manage volatile input costs while staying asset-light compared with its fully integrated peers.

Diamondback’s strategy is simple: It acquires and exploits assets in the low-cost Permian Basin, where it has successfully built an enviable track record. Diamondback began operations in late 2007 following its acquisition of over 4,000 net acres in the Permian producing 800 net barrels of oil equivalent per day. As of 2025, the firm has multiplied its net acreage by more than 200 times and its total daily production by well over 1,000 times. It’s done so through acquisitions, including Energen ($9 billion), QEP ($3 billion), Endeavor ($26 billion, effectively doubling Diamondback’s size), and Double Eagle ($4 billion).

Archer-Daniels-Midland buys, processes, and sells agricultural commodities. The firm purchases crops from farmers and then transports, stores, and/or processes the crops before selling them to food, feed, and energy buyers. The commodity products ADM moves around the world are readily available from competitors. The company has little pricing power over the products it buys and sells, making for slim margins. In addition, the capital intensity of its operations makes it difficult, but not impossible, for ADM to generate consistent economic profits.

Energy Transfer is a diversified midstream firm moving oil, gas, natural gas liquids, and refined products. However, it only excels in a couple of areas, namely natural gas and natural gas liquids. We expect the slowest growth from the crude and NGL segments, as liquids producers have pulled back, while natural gas demand is expected to grow 20%-30% by the end of the decade.

Allison Transmission offers fully automatic transmissions for vocational trucks and other commercial vehicles. Because of its high-quality products and the significant efficiency gains its customers achieve, the company has a dominant share in its core North American on-highway market. Allison's asset-light model requires relatively modest capital investment. As a result, it is a highly cash-generative business that can fund its product development, growth initiatives, and generous shareholder remuneration policies. Because many of its customers are municipalities, demand for its products is generally less volatile, though we think its total addressable market is somewhat limited.

Ametek focuses its mergers and acquisitions sights on targets that hold a leading share within niche, growing markets. It aims to raise the margins of acquired firms by connecting them to its comprehensive suite of prequalified, global suppliers in low-cost regions with expertise in areas such as circuit boards, precision machining, and castings.