Applied Optoelectronics, Inc.
AAOI · Technology · $7.5B mkt cap · FY2025 filings · No moat ·
Doesn't clear the bar
The five investor questions
2021–2025 (latest 5 aligned FYs; v3 window cap 5): revenue $212M to $456M, increasing; diluted EPS -2.01 to -0.64, increasing. Latest-filed diluted EPS remains usable for Business Trend, but an integer share-count change lacks enough evidence to confirm a comparable EPS basis; valuation growth therefore stays at 0%.
Median gross margin 25.9% over 10y, variable.
Median ROIC -14.0%, above the 12% hurdle in 10% of years.
Net cash position — no leverage risk.
Owner earnings trend unclear, share count growing (dilution).
Price vs. conservative owner-earnings floor
A cautious baseline, not a price target: what the shares may support if normalized owner earnings simply hold steady.
- Owner earnings (normalized)
- Not reported
- Owner-earnings floor / share
- Unavailable — insufficient owner-earnings data
- Capped-growth comparison / share
- Unavailable — insufficient growth-model data
- Recent price
- $100.15
- Price vs. owner-earnings floor
- No price data
This floor assumes trailing owner earnings persist — unreliable for declining businesses. The recent FY revenue series does not trigger the three-consecutive-declines flag.
Cohort context: median current price is 239% above the floor across 48 of the current top 50 companies by Moat Score with both values.
Score records captured Jul 26, 2026.
Exactly which 50 companies?
FTNT, META, MEDP, IBEX, MSFT, GOOGL, LULU, ANF, IDXX, TXRH, FHI, QLYS, FFIV, ADBE, LLY, MANH, VEEV, GRMN, SSD, MNST, DOCS, MCO, CPRT, NTAP, LRCX, NVDA, CORT, SFM, MPTI, ULTA, SN, RMD, ROL, PAYC, IRMD, INTU, DECK, MORN, LGCY, DAL, GWW, ISRG, MPWR, CTAS, LOPE, MRK, CMG, FAST, BKNG, ORLY
Missing a usable price or floor: ANF, BKNG.
Model details under moat-index@3.0.0: zero-growth floor 11.1×, capped-growth comparison at no more than 18×; 9% discount rate; high-end growth 0% (capped at 4%) using min(5y revenue CAGR, 5y diluted-EPS CAGR), clamped to 0%–4%; maintenance capex uses min(capex, D&A); abstain when D&A is unavailable. This is a disclosed model range, not intrinsic value as fact.
16 years of fundamentals
The business, in plain English
Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. booked $456M of revenue in FY2025 in the Technology sector and kept 30.0% of it as gross profit — a moderate-margin business by that measure. After every other cost, −8.4% of each revenue dollar reached the bottom line.
Across the filed record, revenue grew from $47.8M (FY2011) to $456M (FY2025) — about 17.5% a year compounded over 14 years.
It earned −7.7% on invested capital in the latest filed year, FY2025. Across the full 15-year measurable filed record, median ROIC was −7.7%. Over the v3 recent window (10 measurable filed years), median ROIC was −14.0%. The Returns on Capital filter above scores it 4/100.
The balance sheet carried $34M of total debt in FY2025. Balance-Sheet Safety scores it 55/100.
Put together: Business Trend is the strongest of the five filters (60/100) and Returns on Capital the weakest (4/100), which is how AAOI lands at 32/100 — a None moat.
This breakdown is generated from the filed numbers and sub-scores above — no outside narrative, no estimates. Where a filing doesn’t disclose an input, the sentence that would need it is omitted instead of guessed.
Gaps in a line mean that item isn’t in AAOI’s filings for that year — the series is never interpolated or estimated. The Table view lists every filed value, including operating and net margins, total debt, and share count.
Moat Score history
Breaks in the line mark methodology or normalizer upgrades — readings across versions aren’t compared, so a level shift there isn’t a change in the business.
Tier changesSame-methodology crossings of the Wide / Narrow / Shallow bars
- Normalizer upgraded unstamped (version unknown)tomoat-xbrl-normalizer@1.1.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 26, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@2.0.0tomoat-index@3.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 23, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@1.2.0tomoat-index@2.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 20, 2026
Scores are logged append-only and never overwritten — this record can’t be backfilled, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping.
Track record
How Applied Optoelectronics, Inc.’s moat rated in each of the years we can reconstruct from its filings — scored only on what was knowable at the time — and what its price and returns did afterward. The score never saw a price; the two are joined only in hindsight, for education, not as a signal.
How to read this: each dot is what the engine would have scored AAOI on that December 31; the line below is its total-return price path (dividends reinvested) in the years since.
Two tracks, one timeline: the score has its own 0–100 scale (top), the price its own 100-based scale (bottom) — never a shared axis. The price path is a total-return (dividends reinvested) index built from the same data the forward returns use; gaps in the score line are years with no reconstructed rating (see the table for why). The Table view carries every value.
What followed, in the years it rated Wide
In the reconstructed history shown, AAOI did not rate Wide-moat in any year, so there is no wide-moat track record to report. That absence is itself the honest answer — we don’t manufacture a comparison where the rating never earned one.
Technology context
Outside the top 500 of 744 scored Technology companies by Moat Score.
Technology leaders by Moat Score
- #1FTNT FORTINET, INC.100.0 out of 100, Wide moatWide moat
- #2META Meta Platforms, Inc.98.4 out of 100, Wide moatWide moat
- #3IBEX IBEX LIMITED98.0 out of 100, Wide moatWide moat
Compare AAOI with Technology leaders →All Technology companies on the Index →
Common questions about AAOI
- Does Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. have an economic moat?
- Based on its FY2025 SEC filings, the Moat Index scores Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. (AAOI) 31.9 out of 100 — below the Shallow-moat bar, so no moat. The five questions behind that score begin at 20% each; if exactly one genuinely lacks data, the other four weights are renormalized and disclosed. revenue and EPS trend 60, pricing power 17, returns on capital 4, balance-sheet safety 55, capital discipline 24.
- How has AAOI's Moat Score changed over time?
- The record logs 16 readings since Jul 17, 2026; the latest reads 31.9 out of 100 (no moat). No tier changes on record yet. (Methodology or normalizer upgrades on Jul 20, 2026, Jul 23, 2026, Jul 26, 2026 re-based the score; readings across versions aren't compared.) The history is append-only — readings are only ever added, never rewritten.