Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) & Seiko Epson (OTCMKTS:SEKEY) Head to Head Survey

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) and Seiko Epson (OTCMKTS:SEKEY) are both technology companies, but which is the superior investment? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their profitability, earnings, dividends, risk, analyst recommendations, valuation and institutional ownership.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings and price targets for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Seiko Epson, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Hewlett Packard Enterprise	0	8	10	2	2.70
Seiko Epson	0	1	0	0	2.00

Hewlett Packard Enterprise currently has a consensus price target of $65.44, suggesting a potential upside of 17.29%. Given Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities analysts plainly believe Hewlett Packard Enterprise is more favorable than Seiko Epson.

Volatility & Risk

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a beta of 1.39, indicating that its share price is 39% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Seiko Epson has a beta of 0.92, indicating that its share price is 8% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

80.8% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares are owned by institutional investors. 0.4% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Seiko Epson’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Hewlett Packard Enterprise	6.60%	15.50%	5.00%
Seiko Epson	1.71%	2.97%	1.66%

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Seiko Epson”s revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Hewlett Packard Enterprise	$34.30 billion	2.16	$57.00 million	$1.92	29.06
Seiko Epson	$9.39 billion	0.84	$113.84 million	$0.26	40.63

Seiko Epson has lower revenue, but higher earnings than Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Seiko Epson, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Dividends

Hewlett Packard Enterprise pays an annual dividend of $0.57 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.0%. Seiko Epson pays an annual dividend of $0.14 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.3%. Hewlett Packard Enterprise pays out 29.7% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Seiko Epson pays out 53.8% 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. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has increased its dividend for 2 consecutive years.

Summary

Hewlett Packard Enterprise beats Seiko Epson on 15 of the 18 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company provides solutions that allow customers to capture, analyze, and act upon data seamlessly in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and Japan. It operates in six segments: Compute, HPC & AI, Storage, Intelligent Edge, Financial Services, and Corporate Investments and Other. The company offers general purpose servers for multi-workload computing and workload-optimized servers; HPE ProLiant rack and tower servers; HPE Synergy; HPE Alletra, HPE GreenLake, Zerto, HPE InfoSight, and HPE CloudPhysics storage products; HPE Cray EX, HPE Cray XD, and converged edge systems; and HPE Superdome Flex, HPE Nonstop, and HPE Integrity products. It also provides HPE Aruba products that includes hardware products, such as Wi-Fi access points, switches, and gateways; HPE Aruba Networking software and services comprising cloud-based management, network management and access control, analytics and assurance, software-defined wide-area networking, network security, analytics and assurance, and location services software; and professional and support services, as well as as-a-service and consumption models. In addition, the company offers leasing, financing, IT consumption, and utility programs and asset management services for customers to facilitate technology deployment models and the acquisition of various IT solutions, including hardware, software, and services from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others; consultative-led services; HPE Ezmeral Container Platform; HPE Ezmeral Software Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral Software Data Fabric; OpsRamp; and Hewlett Packard Labs. It serves commercial and large enterprise groups, such as business and public sector enterprises; and through various partners comprising resellers, distribution partners, original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors, systems integrators, and advisory firms. The company was founded in 1939 and is headquartered in Spring, Texas.

About Seiko Epson

Seiko Epson Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, develops, manufactures, sells, and provides services for products in the printing solutions, visual communications, manufacturing-related and wearables, and other businesses. It operates through three segments: Printing Solutions, Visual Communications, and Manufacturing-related and Wearables segments. The Printing Solutions segment offers home and office inkjet printers, serial impact dot matrix printers, page printers, color image scanners, dry process office papermaking systems, commercial and industrial inkjet printers, inkjet printheads, printers for use in POS systems, label printers, printer consumables, and others. The Visual Communications segment provides 3LCD projectors for business, education, the home, and event; smart glasses; and others. The Manufacturing-related and Wearables segment offers wristwatches, watch movements, and others; factory automation products, industrial robots, compact injection molders, and other production systems; and crystal units, crystal oscillators, quartz sensors, and others for consumer, automotive, and industrial equipment applications. This segment also provides CMOS LSIs and other chips primarily for consumer electronics and automotive applications; and metal powders for use as raw materials in the production of electronic components, etc., as well as value-added surface finishing in a range of industrial fields. The company also sells PCs, etc. It has operations in Japan, the Philippines, the United States, Indonesia, China, and internationally. Seiko Epson Corporation was incorporated in 1942 and is headquartered in Suwa, Japan.