Head-To-Head Review: Verisk Analytics (NASDAQ:VRSK) & Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM)

Verisk Analytics (NASDAQ:VRSK) and Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) are both large-cap business services companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their institutional ownership, earnings, risk, dividends, valuation, analyst recommendations and profitability.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

90.0% of Verisk Analytics shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 80.1% of Iron Mountain shares are held by institutional investors. 0.5% of Verisk Analytics shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 1.9% of Iron Mountain shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for Verisk Analytics and Iron Mountain, as reported by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Verisk Analytics	1	5	5	0	2.36
Iron Mountain	0	0	6	1	3.14

Verisk Analytics currently has a consensus price target of $308.09, suggesting a potential upside of 24.70%. Iron Mountain has a consensus price target of $116.83, suggesting a potential upside of 15.55%. Given Verisk Analytics’ higher possible upside, equities analysts clearly believe Verisk Analytics is more favorable than Iron Mountain.

Dividends

Verisk Analytics pays an annual dividend of $1.80 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.7%. Iron Mountain pays an annual dividend of $3.14 per share and has a dividend yield of 3.1%. Verisk Analytics pays out 27.7% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Iron Mountain pays out 2,242.9% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. Verisk Analytics has increased its dividend for 6 consecutive years and Iron Mountain has increased its dividend for 3 consecutive years.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Verisk Analytics and Iron Mountain”s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Verisk Analytics	$2.88 billion	11.98	$958.20 million	$6.49	38.07
Iron Mountain	$6.15 billion	4.86	$180.16 million	$0.14	722.19

Verisk Analytics has higher earnings, but lower revenue than Iron Mountain. Verisk Analytics is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Iron Mountain, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares Verisk Analytics and Iron Mountain’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Verisk Analytics	30.67%	460.89%	20.80%
Iron Mountain	0.66%	-146.80%	2.83%

Risk and Volatility

Verisk Analytics has a beta of 0.86, suggesting that its stock price is 14% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Iron Mountain has a beta of 1.08, suggesting that its stock price is 8% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Verisk Analytics beats Iron Mountain on 10 of the 18 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Verisk Analytics

Verisk Analytics, Inc. provides data analytics and technology solutions to the insurance markets in the United States and internationally. It offers policy language, prospective loss costs, policy writing and rating rules, and various underwriting solutions for risk selection and segmentation, pricing, and workflow optimization; property- and auto- specific rating and underwriting information solutions that allows clients to understand, quantify, underwrite, mitigate, and avoid potential loss for risks; catastrophe modeling solutions, which enables companies to identify, quantify, and plan for the financial consequences of catastrophes for use by insurers, reinsurers, intermediaries, financial institutions, and governments. The company also provides life insurance solutions for transforming current workflows in life insurance underwriting, claim insights, policy administration, unclaimed property/equity, compliance and fraud detection, and actuarial and portfolio modeling; Marketing Solutions, such as compliant, real-time decisioning, profitability, and risk assessment for inbound consumer interactions; and international underwriting and claims solutions. In addition, it offers claims insurance solutions, which provides analytics in fraud detection, compliance reporting, subrogation liability assessment, litigation, and repair cost estimation and valuation solutions; and casualty solutions, such as compliance, casualty claims decision support, and workflow automation solutions. Further, the company supplies software to the specialty insurance market. The company was founded in 1971 and is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.

About Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) is a global leader in information management services. Founded in 1951 and trusted by more than 240,000 customers worldwide, Iron Mountain serves to protect and elevate the power of our customers’ work. Through a range of offerings including digital transformation, data centers, secure records storage, information management, asset lifecycle management, secure destruction and art storage and logistics, Iron Mountain helps businesses bring light to their dark data, enabling customers to unlock value and intelligence from their stored digital and physical assets at speed and with security, while helping them meet their environmental goals.