Head-To-Head Analysis: Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ:TWST) versus Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE:TMO)

Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE:TMO) and Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ:TWST) are both healthcare companies, but which is the better business? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, analyst recommendations, profitability, risk, valuation, institutional ownership and dividends.

Volatility & Risk

Thermo Fisher Scientific has a beta of 0.87, indicating that its share price is 13% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Twist Bioscience has a beta of 2.19, indicating that its share price is 119% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Thermo Fisher Scientific and Twist Bioscience’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Thermo Fisher Scientific	14.94%	17.33%	8.18%
Twist Bioscience	-31.66%	-28.64%	-19.94%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of current recommendations and price targets for Thermo Fisher Scientific and Twist Bioscience, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Thermo Fisher Scientific	2	3	18	2	2.80
Twist Bioscience	2	3	8	0	2.46

Thermo Fisher Scientific currently has a consensus price target of $675.52, indicating a potential downside of 0.08%. Twist Bioscience has a consensus price target of $143.67, indicating a potential upside of 6.05%. Given Twist Bioscience’s higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Twist Bioscience is more favorable than Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

89.2% of Thermo Fisher Scientific shares are held by institutional investors. 0.3% of Thermo Fisher Scientific shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 3.1% of Twist Bioscience shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Thermo Fisher Scientific and Twist Bioscience”s gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Thermo Fisher Scientific	$44.56 billion	5.61	$6.70 billion	$18.59	36.37
Twist Bioscience	$376.57 million	22.56	-$77.67 million	($2.22)	-61.02

Thermo Fisher Scientific has higher revenue and earnings than Twist Bioscience. Twist Bioscience is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Thermo Fisher Scientific, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Thermo Fisher Scientific beats Twist Bioscience on 11 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. provides life sciences solutions, analytical instruments, specialty diagnostics, and laboratory products and biopharma services in the North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and internationally. The company's Life Sciences Solutions segment offers reagents, instruments, and consumables for biological and medical research, discovery, and production of drugs and vaccines, as well as diagnosis of infections and diseases; and solutions include biosciences, genetic sciences, and bio production to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agricultural, clinical, healthcare, academic, and government markets. Its Analytical Instruments segment provides instruments, consumables, software, and services for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic, government, environmental, and other research and industrial markets, as well as clinical laboratories. The company's Specialty Diagnostics segment offers liquid, ready-to-use, and lyophilized immunodiagnostic reagent kits, as well as calibrators, controls, protein detection assays, and instruments; immunodiagnostics develops, manufactures and markets complete bloodtest systems to support the clinical diagnosis and monitoring of allergy, asthma and autoimmune diseases; dehydrated and prepared culture media, collection and transport systems, instrumentation, and consumables; human leukocyte antigen typing and testing for organ transplant market; and healthcare products. Its Laboratory Products and Biopharma Services segment provides laboratory products, research and safety market channel, and pharma services and clinical research. It offers products and services through a direct sales force, customer-service professionals, electronic commerce, and third-party distributors under Thermo Scientific; Applied Biosystems; Invitrogen; Fisher Scientific; Unity Lab Services; and Patheon and PPD. Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. was founded in 1956 and is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.

About Twist Bioscience

Twist Bioscience Corporation engages in the manufacture and sale of synthetic DNA-based products. The company offers synthetic genes and gene fragments used in product development for therapeutics, diagnostics, chemicals/materials, food/agriculture, data storage, and various applications within academic research by biotech, pharma, industrial chemical, and agricultural companies, as well as academic labs; Oligo pools used in targeted NGS, CRISPR gene editing, mutagenesis experiments, DNA origami, DNA computing, data storage in DNA, and other applications; and immunoglobulin G proteins for customers focused on the pursuit of drug discovery and development. It also provides NGS tools comprising library preparation kits, human exome kits, and fixed and custom panels, as well as alliance panels, primarily used within diagnostic tests for various indications, population genetics research and biomarker discovery, translational research, microbiology, and applied markets research; and methylation detection kits for cancer, and rare and inherited disease study, as well as fast hybridization and full RNA sequencing workflow solution. In addition, the company provides synthetic SARS-CoV-2 RNA reference sequences as positive controls for the development of both NGS and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction assays; synthetic monkeypox controls; and various respiratory viral controls, including for influenzas, respiratory syncytial virus, rhinoviruses, SARS, MERS, and coronaviruses. Further, it offers SARS-CoV-2 Research Panels, such as the Twist Respiratory Virus Panel and the Pan-Viral Research Panel, for the detection of disease in a research setting; precision DNA libraries used for antibody engineering, affinity maturation, and humanization; and antibody optimization solution to enable simultaneous optimization of multiple characteristics of a given antibody. The company was incorporated in 2013 and is headquartered in South San Francisco, California.