Financial Survey: Accenture (NYSE:ACN) vs. Vertiv (NYSE:VRT)

Vertiv (NYSE:VRT) and Accenture (NYSE:ACN) are both large-cap computer and technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, analyst recommendations, valuation, institutional ownership, risk, earnings and dividends.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings and recommmendations for Vertiv and Accenture, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Vertiv	1	8	18	1	2.68
Accenture	1	10	14	1	2.58

Vertiv presently has a consensus target price of $149.84, suggesting a potential downside of 11.38%. Accenture has a consensus target price of $300.22, suggesting a potential upside of 24.51%. Given Accenture’s higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Accenture is more favorable than Vertiv.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Vertiv and Accenture”s revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Vertiv	$8.01 billion	8.06	$495.80 million	$2.09	80.90
Accenture	$69.67 billion	2.17	$7.68 billion	$12.15	19.84

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

Volatility and Risk

Vertiv has a beta of 1.84, suggesting that its stock price is 84% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Accenture has a beta of 1.28, suggesting that its stock price is 28% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Vertiv and Accenture’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Vertiv	8.93%	51.64%	13.69%
Accenture	11.02%	26.45%	13.21%

Insider & Institutional Ownership

89.9% of Vertiv shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 75.1% of Accenture shares are held by institutional investors. 2.6% of Vertiv shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 0.0% of Accenture shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Dividends

Vertiv pays an annual dividend of $0.15 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.1%. Accenture pays an annual dividend of $5.92 per share and has a dividend yield of 2.5%. Vertiv pays out 7.2% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Accenture pays out 48.7% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Both companies have healthy payout ratios and should be able to cover their dividend payments with earnings for the next several years. Vertiv has increased its dividend for 2 consecutive years and Accenture has increased its dividend for 20 consecutive years. Accenture is clearly the better dividend stock, given its higher yield and longer track record of dividend growth.

Summary

Vertiv beats Accenture on 10 of the 17 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Vertiv

Vertiv Holdings Co, together with its subsidiaries, designs, manufactures, and services critical digital infrastructure technologies and life cycle services for data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial environments in the Americas, the Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It offers AC and DC power management products, switchgear and busbar products, thermal management products, integrated rack systems, modular solutions, and management systems for monitoring and controlling digital infrastructure that are integral to the technologies used for various services, including e-commerce, online banking, file sharing, video on-demand, energy storage, wireless communications, Internet of Things, and online gaming. The company also provides lifecycle management services, predictive analytics, and professional services for deploying, maintaining, and optimizing its products and their related systems; and preventative maintenance, acceptance testing, engineering and consulting, performance assessments, remote monitoring, training, spare parts, and digital critical infrastructure software services. It offers its products primarily under the Vertiv, Liebert, NetSure, Geist, E&I, Powerbar, and Avocent brands. The company serves cloud services, financial services, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, energy, education, government, social media, and retail industries through a network of direct sales professionals, independent sales representatives, channel partners, and original equipment manufacturers. Vertiv Holdings Co is headquartered in Westerville, Ohio.

About Accenture

Accenture plc, a professional services company, provides strategy and consulting, industry X, song, and technology and operation services worldwide. The company offers application services, including agile transformation, DevOps, application modernization, enterprise architecture, software and quality engineering, data management; intelligent automation comprising robotic process automation, natural language processing, and virtual agents; and application management services, as well as software engineering services; strategy and consulting services; data and analytics strategy, data discovery and augmentation, data management and beyond, data democratization, and industrialized solutions comprising turnkey analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions; metaverse; and sustainability services. It also provides change management, HR transformation and delivery, organization strategy and design, talent strategy and development, and leadership and culture services; digital commerce; infrastructure services, including cloud infrastructure managed, cloud and data center, network, digital workplace, database platforms, service management, and cloud and infrastructure security services; data-enabled operating models; technology consulting and AI services; and technology consulting services. In addition, the company offers engineering and R&D digitization, smart connected products, product as-a-service enablement, capital projects, intelligent asset management, digital industrial workforce, and autonomous robotic systems; business process outsourcing; and services related to technology innovation. Further, it provides cloud, ecosystem, marketing, security, supply chain management, zero-based transformation, customer experience, finance consulting, mergers and acquisitions, and sustainability services. The company has a collaboration with Salesforce, Inc. to develop Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud. The company was founded in 1951 and is based in Dublin, Ireland.