Financial Review: Grail (GRAL) vs. Its Competitors

Grail (NASDAQ:GRAL) is one of 48 publicly-traded companies in the “Medical laboratories” industry, but how does it contrast to its rivals? We will compare Grail to similar businesses based on the strength of its earnings, risk, institutional ownership, profitability, dividends, analyst recommendations and valuation.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for Grail and its rivals, as reported by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Grail	0	3	1	0	2.25
Grail Competitors	365	1437	2418	42	2.50

Grail currently has a consensus price target of $31.50, suggesting a potential downside of 15.91%. As a group, “Medical laboratories” companies have a potential upside of 1,419.69%. Given Grail’s rivals stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Grail has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Grail and its rivals top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Net Income	Price/Earnings Ratio
Grail	$130.71 million	N/A	-0.61
Grail Competitors	$1.05 billion	-$110.55 million	-7.71

Grail’s rivals have higher revenue, but lower earnings than Grail. Grail is trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than its rivals, indicating that it is currently more expensive than other companies in its industry.

Profitability

This table compares Grail and its rivals’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Grail	N/A	N/A	N/A
Grail Competitors	-3,479.68%	-975.07%	-26.59%

Insider & Institutional Ownership

47.5% of shares of all “Medical laboratories” companies are held by institutional investors. 1.9% of Grail shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 16.8% of shares of all “Medical laboratories” companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Summary

Grail rivals beat Grail on 7 of the 11 factors compared.

Grail Company Profile

GRAIL, Inc. operates as a commercial-stage healthcare company, which engages in the development of a technology for early detection of cancer. It utilizes machine learning, software, and automation to detect and identify multiple deadly cancer types in earlier stages. The company was founded by Jeffrey T. Huber, William H. Rastetter, Mostafa Ronaghi, and Richard D. Klausner on September 11, 2015 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA.