VeriSign (NASDAQ:VRSN) & Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) Head-To-Head Review

Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) and VeriSign (NASDAQ:VRSN) are both technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their risk, valuation, institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, earnings, profitability and dividends.

Profitability

This table compares Applied Digital and VeriSign’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Applied Digital	-51.28%	-27.21%	-5.23%
VeriSign	49.06%	-38.40%	59.95%

Risk and Volatility

Applied Digital has a beta of 5.99, suggesting that its stock price is 499% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, VeriSign has a beta of 0.69, suggesting that its stock price is 31% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

65.7% of Applied Digital shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 92.9% of VeriSign shares are held by institutional investors. 9.5% of Applied Digital shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 0.6% of VeriSign shares are held by 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.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings and price targets for Applied Digital and VeriSign, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Applied Digital	2	2	12	3	2.84
VeriSign	0	2	4	0	2.67

Applied Digital currently has a consensus target price of $59.75, suggesting a potential upside of 224.76%. VeriSign has a consensus target price of $352.00, suggesting a potential upside of 14.67%. Given Applied Digital’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities analysts clearly believe Applied Digital is more favorable than VeriSign.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Applied Digital and VeriSign”s top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Applied Digital	$611.31 million	9.10	-$244.00 million	($1.64)	-11.22
VeriSign	$1.66 billion	16.62	$825.70 million	$9.30	33.01

VeriSign has higher revenue and earnings than Applied Digital. Applied Digital is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than VeriSign, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

VeriSign beats Applied Digital on 8 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Applied Digital

Applied Digital Corporation designs, develops, and operates datacenters in North America. Its datacenters provide digital infrastructure solutions to the high-performance computing industry. The company also provides artificial intelligence cloud services, high performance computing datacenter hosting, and crypto datacenter hosting services. The company was formerly known as Applied Blockchain, Inc. and changed its name to Applied Digital Corporation in November 2022. Applied Digital Corporation is based in Dallas, Texas.

About VeriSign

VeriSign, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides domain name registry services and internet infrastructure that enables internet navigation for various recognized domain names worldwide. The company enables the security, stability, and resiliency of internet infrastructure and services, including providing root zone maintainer services, operating two of thirteen internet root servers; and offering registration services and authoritative resolution for the .com and .net domains, which supports global e-commerce. It operates directory for .name and .cc; and back-end systems for .edu, domain names. VeriSign, Inc. was incorporated in 1995 and is headquartered in Reston, Virginia.