Silicom (NASDAQ:SILC – Get Free Report) and Ciena (NYSE:CIEN – Get Free Report) are both technology companies, but which is the superior business? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, dividends, risk, institutional ownership, profitability, valuation and earnings.
Institutional and Insider Ownership
52.8% of Silicom shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 92.0% of Ciena shares are owned by institutional investors. 25.4% of Silicom shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 0.6% of Ciena shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company is poised for long-term growth.
Analyst Recommendations
This is a breakdown of current recommendations and price targets for Silicom and Ciena, as reported by MarketBeat.
| Sell Ratings | Hold Ratings | Buy Ratings | Strong Buy Ratings | Rating Score | |
| Silicom | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2.00 |
| Ciena | 0 | 6 | 13 | 1 | 2.75 |
Profitability
This table compares Silicom and Ciena’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.
| Net Margins | Return on Equity | Return on Assets | |
| Silicom | -12.98% | -8.37% | -6.26% |
| Ciena | 10.87% | 25.33% | 11.27% |
Earnings and Valuation
This table compares Silicom and Ciena”s revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.
| Gross Revenue | Price/Sales Ratio | Net Income | Earnings Per Share | Price/Earnings Ratio | |
| Silicom | $75.43 million | 3.22 | -$11.48 million | ($1.71) | -24.71 |
| Ciena | $4.77 billion | 10.38 | $123.34 million | $4.48 | 77.90 |
Ciena has higher revenue and earnings than Silicom. Silicom is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Ciena, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.
Risk and Volatility
Silicom has a beta of 1.57, meaning that its share price is 57% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Ciena has a beta of 1.3, meaning that its share price is 30% more volatile than the S&P 500.
Summary
Ciena beats Silicom on 12 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.
About Silicom
Silicom Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, designs, manufactures, markets, and supports networking and data infrastructure solutions for servers, server-based systems, and communications devices. It offers server network interface cards; and smart cards, such as smart server adapters, which include redirector and switching cards, encryption and data compression hardware acceleration cards, forward error correction acceleration and offloading cards, time synchronization cards, and field programmable gate array-based cards. The company also provides virtualized and universal customer-premises equipment; and edge devices for SD-WAN, secure access service edge, Telco dedicated routers, and NFV deployments. It serves original equipment manufacturing, cloud, telco, mobile, and related service provider markets. The company operates in the United States, North America, Israel, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. Silicom Ltd. was incorporated in 1987 and is headquartered in Kfar Saba, Israel.
About Ciena
Ciena Corporation provides hardware and software services for delivery of video, data, and voice traffic metro, aggregation, and access communications network worldwide. The company’s Networking Platforms segment offers convergence of coherent optical transport, open optical networking, optical transport network switching, IP routing, and switching services. Its products include 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, Waveserver stackable interconnect system, and the 6500 Reconfigurable line system, and the 5400 family of Packet-Optical platforms, as well as 8100 coherent routing platforms; 3000 family of service delivery switches and the 5000 family of service aggregation switches, as well as 8700 Packetwave Platform and 6500 Packet Transport System. This segment also sells operating system software and enhanced software features embedded in each of its products. The company’s Blue Planet Automation Software and Services segment provides multi-domain service orchestration, inventory, route optimization and analysis, multi-cloud orchestration, and unified assurance and analytics services. Its Platform Software and Service segment offers MCP domain controller solution, and OneControl unified management system, as well as planning tools. The company’s Global Services segment provides maintenance support and training, installation and deployment, and consulting and network design services. Ciena Corporation was incorporated in 1992 and is headquartered in Hanover, Maryland.
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