Comparing Cars.com (CARS) & Sphere 3D (ANY)

Cars.com (NYSE: CARS) and Sphere 3D (NASDAQ:ANY) are both retail/wholesale companies, but which is the better business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their valuation, dividends, analyst recommendations, risk, institutional ownership, profitability and earnings.

Analyst Recommendations

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This is a breakdown of recent ratings for Cars.com and Sphere 3D, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Cars.com	0	2	3	0	2.60
Sphere 3D	0	0	0	0	N/A

Cars.com currently has a consensus target price of $34.38, indicating a potential upside of 16.05%. Given Cars.com’s higher possible upside, equities research analysts clearly believe Cars.com is more favorable than Sphere 3D.

Profitability

This table compares Cars.com and Sphere 3D’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Cars.com	31.35%	9.11%	5.63%
Sphere 3D	-31.80%	-84.04%	-11.62%

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Cars.com and Sphere 3D’s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Cars.com	$626.26 million	3.40	$224.44 million	$2.28	12.99
Sphere 3D	$81.52 million	0.09	-$26.18 million	N/A	N/A

Cars.com has higher revenue and earnings than Sphere 3D.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

6.6% of Sphere 3D shares are held by institutional investors. 0.0% of Cars.com shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 1.1% of Sphere 3D shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Summary

Cars.com beats Sphere 3D on 8 of the 10 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Cars.com

Cars.com Inc., through its subsidiaries, operates as a digital automotive marketplace that connects local car dealers to consumers in the United States. The company offers a suite of digital solutions that creates connections between individuals researching cars or looking to purchase a car with car dealerships and automotive original equipment manufacturers. It also sells online subscription advertising products to car dealerships by its direct sales force, as well as through its affiliate sales channel. In addition, the company sells display advertising to national advertisers. Further, it offers online automotive marketplace service that connects buyers and sellers through Cars.com, Auto.com, DealerRater.com, NewCars.com, PickupTrucks.com, DealerInspire.com, and LaunchDigitalMarketing.com Websites. Its platform hosts approximately 4.9 million new and used vehicle listings and serves approximately 20,000 franchise and independent car dealers. Cars.com Inc. was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

About Sphere 3D

Sphere 3D Corp. provides data management, and desktop and application virtualization solutions in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. It enables organizations to deploy a combination of public, private, or hybrid cloud strategies through containerized applications, virtual desktops, virtual storage, and physical hyper-converged platforms. The company offers RDX removable disk systems that provide scalability, centralized management, encryption and duplication, and reliability for backup, archive, data interchange, and disaster recovery; G-Series Appliance and G-Series Cloud applications; and Glassware Open Virtual Appliance and Open Virtual Format products. It also provides HVE converged and hyper-converged Infrastructure solutions, such as HVE-STACK high density server solution; HVE-VELOCITY high availability dual enclosure storage area network solution; and HVE 3DGFX, a virtualized desktop infrastructure solution. In addition, the company offers SnapServer network attached storage solution, a platform for primary or nearline storage for integration with Windows, UNIX/Linux, and Macintosh environments; NEO tape-based backup and long-term archive solutions, including tape libraries, autoloaders, and drives, as well as linear tape file system solutions; and LTO tape drives and media products. Sphere 3D Corp. markets its products under the RDX, Glassware 2.0, SnapCLOUD, SnapServer, SnapSync, NEO, and V3 brand names. The company sells its products through its distributor and reseller network to small and medium businesses, and distributed enterprises. Sphere 3D Corp. is headquartered in Mississauga, Canada.