2020
19 Business Moats
That Helped Shape
The World’s Most
Massive Companies
CB Insights helps the world’s leading companies make
smarter technology decisions with data, not opinion.
Our Technology Insights Platform provides companies
with comprehensive data, expert insights and work
management tools to drive growth and improve
operations with technology.
WHAT IS CB INSIGHTS?
SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL
3
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Table of Contents
Network Effect Moats
6
Cost Moats


29
Cultural Moats

45
Resource Moats

57
The New Moats

72
4
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
What do companies like Amazon, Uber, and Starbucks have in common?
Among several shared characteristics, these companies thrive by
understanding, building, and strengthening their business moats —
the key competitive advantages that set them apart.
Warren Buffett helped popularize the concept, saying a company’s
moat (or lack thereof) means everything when deciding to invest in it:
“The key… is not assessing how much an
industry is going to affect society, or how
much it will grow, but rather determining
the competitive advantage of any given
company and, above all, the durability of
that advantage.”
Companies can build moats by strengthening their brands,
achieving economies of scale, or even lobbying for special status
from the government. In return, they can receive customer loyalty,
pricing power, and legal protections that make it difficult for other
companies to compete with them.
A business moat is a key competitive
advantage that sets a company apart from
its competitors. From Amazon and Uber to
Starbucks and Disney, here are how 19 of
the world’s biggest companies have built
and defended their moats.
5
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
In the 20th century, the biggest companies in the world were built
on moats of economies of scale or government. Standard Oil,
for example, built its monopoly by buying up smaller competitor
refineries and building a global distribution network. Eventually, the
company controlled about 90% of all the refineries and pipelines in
the United States, and could set its own prices.
Today, however, the most durable moats are being built on different
types of advantages, such as network effects, data, and repeat
engagement within a product ecosystem.
Google, for example, started its moat by developing a better
algorithm for indexing and searching the internet. The company
has since strengthened that moat by putting that advantage
to work in transportation, shopping, and most importantly,
advertising.
Below, we look into 19 examples of business moats and dive into
how they work.
The examples below were chosen according criteria such as size,
business success, and ability to illustrate the mechanics and
advantages of a particular type of business moat. Many of these
companies could fit into multiple categories of business moat,
even though we only list one per company.
6
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
A product has a network effect when its value to its users increases
in proportion to its use.
For example, the telephone wasn’t very useful when only a
handful of first adopters had one. The more people that acquired
telephones, however, the more useful it got. Once virtually everyone
had a telephone in their home, it became indispensable.
The same logic has powered the growth of social networks, which
are extremely sticky if all of your friends are on them — and useless
if they’re not.

Because network effects can allow a product to gain wide utility
fast, they can help companies build formidable business moats. A
product with strong network effects can be extremely difficult to
dislodge, though not impossible if a competitor project is better
at leveraging network effects (MySpace’s fall to Facebook is one
high-profile example of this).
Network effect moats
7
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Companies that build products with network effects can generate
a few different kinds of business moats around their companies,
depending on how their network effects work.
MARKETPLACE NETWORK EFFECT
Marketplace network effect moats exist when a company derives a
durable competitive advantage from bringing together customers
and suppliers in some kind of marketplace.
In the best-case scenario, aggregating the supply and demand for
a given good or service creates a self-reinforcing cycle of growth
built on network effects. As more competing suppliers join the
marketplace, customers find that it provides more efficient and
less expensive service.
As more customers are drawn to the marketplace for its quality or low
prices, more suppliers join, driving further competition and growth.
Amazon’s flywheel.
8
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Leveraging marketplace network effects, Amazon was able to
reduce prices, expand inventory, and decrease shipping times,
growing from a small online bookstore to the dominant global
e-commerce marketplace.
DATA NETWORK EFFECT
Data network effect moats exist when a company can gain a
competitive advantage by gathering user data and making that
data more valuable.
In a product with a data network effect moat, there is a “central
repository” of data, as Andreessen Horowitz’s Alex Rampell calls
it. The more people adding to this repository, the more useful it
becomes. Companies can use that data both to attract other users to
the platform and to build better algorithms to provide a better product.
Google, for example, built its competitive advantage on its search
algorithms, and then built a moat by applying that advantage to its
advertising capability.
PLATFORM NETWORK EFFECT
Platform network effect moats exist when a company builds a
durable competitive advantage by keeping its users engaged in its
product ecosystem.
Platform network effects are generally built on one product — for
example, the iPhone, or Windows — that becomes core to a user’s
life or work. New products that are released — such as the App
Store, or Microsoft Office — both reinforce the core product’s initial
value and layer more value on top of it.
Each successful new product makes staying in the ecosystem
more valuable, increases the cost of switching, and keeps users’
attention and money within the platform.
9
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
DURABILITY IS KEY
These three techniques — aggregating suppliers and customers,
collecting valuable data, and building a product ecosystem —
won’t always result in a moat. History is full of companies that
have built temporary advantages based on network effects that
then fell.
Moats are made of durable competitive advantages, and durability
hinges on a number of factors, including:
• User acquisition: whether the cost to acquire new users,
customers, or suppliers decreases with scale
• Switching costs: whether it is cumbersome or expensive for
customers to switch to another company for the same service
• Engagement: whether the product becomes stickier and more
engaging as it grows
The better any product with network effects can optimize its
cost of user acquisition, capitalize on high switching costs, and
increase engagement, the more likely it is to be able to maintain its
user base and fend off competitors.
10
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
11
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
1. Marketplace
The virtuous circle that made Amazon
an $850B business
While Amazon’s dominance has been built on a variety of moats,
its central business advantage comes from harnessing the
marketplace network effects that come from aggregating suppliers
and customers.
Amazon recognized early on that the more people in its network —
both suppliers and customers — the lower the prices it could offer
to buyers. Lower prices meant a better customer experience that
attracted more customers; more customers attracted more sellers;
more sellers meant a better selection of goods and prices; better
goods and prices created a better customer experience; and so on.
Over time Amazon has expanded into new retail verticals, added
features, and even created marketplaces that compete with its own
marketplace — all in the pursuit of increasing user engagement
and fueling a virtuous circle of growth.
In the late 1990s, Amazon first began expanding from books to
other media products, like CDs, movies, and other electronics. A
few years later, Marketplace launched, giving third-party sellers
the ability to sell products alongside the Amazon listing.
While the Marketplace technically may have cannibalized Amazon
sales, it served the purpose of the Amazon flywheel by reinforcing
for customers that Amazon was the best and cheapest place to shop.
Bringing in more customers through better functionality and
growth into new verticals, Amazon used the growth that resulted
to bring in more suppliers, who began to see Amazon as the best
way to reach a global customer base and increase their revenues.
12
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
In 2005, Amazon used its newfound capabilities in shipping
and logistics to start its Prime program, offering free 2-day
shipping inside the contiguous United States for an annual price
of $79. Prime made Amazon delivery faster than virtually any
other e-commerce outlet, and created an inflection point in the
company’s growth. As of 2019, membership in the Prime program
is at about 103M in the United States.
“I want to draw a moat around our best
customers,” Bezos said while Amazon was
planning Prime. “We’re not going to take
our best customers for granted.”
In 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services in earnest with
the release of Elastic Compute Cloud. After improving its own
back-end in order to better scale up its computing power, Amazon
then was able to make that same power available to startups and
other customers.
Today, AWS is Amazon’s second-largest source of revenue. With
the growth of AWS, Amazon’s computing power rose, and its unit
costs on renting that power out to others fell.
Amazon continues to use its profits to lower prices, increase
supply, and build a better customer experience — feeding the
fundamental flywheel that helped it become the biggest online
retailer in the world.
13
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
For example, in June 2017, Amazon announced that it was
acquiring Whole Foods for $13.7B. Immediately, the company
lowered prices on high-volume Whole Foods items and threaded
in Prime membership discounts. Whole Foods deliveries are also
available at no extra cost through Amazon’s Prime Now service,
giving Prime customers the extra benefit of groceries on demand.
When Amazon enters a new market, it does so with its formidable
scale, massive user base, and a willingness to duke it out in
industries with razor-thin margins — a strategy that has allowed it
to grow from a small bookseller to a true Everything Store.
14
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
2. Marketplace
How OpenTable created a monopoly by
giving restaurants a ‘single-player mode’
OpenTable’s domination of the online restaurant reservation
market has been built on its ability to attract a critical mass of
restaurants and diners to its platform.
OpenTable’s simple online interface offered diners a more
convenient way to make a restaurant reservation, while also
offering restaurants a more efficient way to manage reservations,
get more customers through the doors, and deal with the
industry’s famously thin margins.
While most products with network effects aren’t useful until there
are many people on the network (like the telephone), OpenTable
started out by building and selling a piece of software that
delivered value even without any customers involved — a strategy
that a16z partner Chris Dixon calls “single player mode.”
“The first million people who bought
VCRs bought them before there were any
movies available to watch on them. They
just wanted to ‘time shift’ TV shows –
what we use DVRs for today. Once there
were millions of VCR owners it became
worthwhile for Hollywood to start selling
and renting movies to watch on them…
15
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Thus, a product that eventually had very
strong network effects got its initial
traction from a ‘standalone use’ – where
no other VCR owners or complementary
products needed to exist.”
The original OpenTable app for restaurants was essentially an
electronic reservation book for restaurants that made the
day-to-day work of turning over tables more straightforward and
less error prone.
The app also became the necessary foundation of the reservation
tool that would follow, since so few restaurants had digitized back-
ends. When the OpenTable team successfully pitched restaurants
on this software, they were also successfully pitching the idea of
putting a networked computer inside the restaurant.
The more restaurants OpenTable got to use that software, the
more attractive the idea of an online reservation system became
for both the demand and supply side of the marketplace. More
restaurants meant more choice for consumers. More choice
attracted more consumers, which gave restaurants more business.
The idea took off, and by the time OpenTable went public in 2009,
the company was claiming that a third of the 30,000 reservation-
taking restaurants in America were OpenTable customers.
OpenTable also benefitted from making its product a core part
of everyday operations. The company put a proprietary software
terminal in the thousands of restaurants that signed up to use the
service. That terminal became used for regular operations (not
just OpenTable), creating a significant barrier to entry for other
companies hoping to edge into the restaurant reservation market.
16
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
To give up OpenTable, a restaurant would have to toss out a major
piece of infrastructure, not to mention a source of traffic.
The difficulty of switching to a competitor platform has allowed
OpenTable to establish a highly favorable take rate: OpenTable
charges restaurants $249 per month for its platform, plus $1 per
reservation. OpenTable even charges a 25-cent fee for customers
who make reservations through a restaurant’s website directly.
While these rates fueled OpenTable’s significant growth through
the early parts of the 2000s, they have also prompted a wave of
disruptive startup competitors like Resy, launched in 2014.
While OpenTable remains the tool of choice for booking reservations
at Michelin Star restaurants, Resy and other tools are gaining ground
when it comes to smaller and newer restaurants — suggesting that
OpenTable’s moat was showing some vulnerabilities among newer
restaurants not already locked into its platform.
But even as new competitors emerge, OpenTable still has a big
advantage when it comes to scale. For about a decade, OpenTable
was essentially the only player in the restaurant reservation market,
giving it a huge head start on acquiring customers and restaurants.
17
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
3. Marketplace
How Uber dominated ride-sharing by
owning supply and demand
Uber has become an archetypal example of a company built on
aggregating supply and demand.
Early on, Uber attracted independent drivers (the supply) to its
platform by offering a guaranteed source of customers. For drivers
without a central dispatcher, it could be difficult to find fares, and
drivers would often have to idle near hotels and airports to make
their living. With Uber, those drivers could pick up fares at any
time, giving them a way to make money during the dead time
between pickups.
At the same time, Uber attracted users (demand) by providing
them with a guaranteed driver. When cab services dominated non-
public transportation, it could be challenging even in major cities
to find a ride during non-optimal working hours or bad weather
(research has shown an average of 7% less cabs on the road when
it rains in New York City).
To ensure that a ride was always available when a potential fare
opened the app, Uber used a model that would become known as
surge pricing. During times of higher demand, prices on rides were
raised, increasing the supply of drivers and increasing accessibility
for the demand side.
18
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Bringing these two sides of the marketplace together created a
virtuous circle of growth.
With every new driver that Uber added to the platform, the
geographic reach of the app increased: there were more drivers in
more places, meaning a shorter wait for a ride for Uber customers.
The shorter the wait for a ride, the more users that Uber could
attract. The more users Uber attracted, the more drivers it
attracted too — further decreasing time-to-ride and increasing
geographic reach.
Uber’s ability to aggressively add drivers and riders to its platform
through marketing and promotions kickstarted those network
effects in each new market it entered, and the virtuous circles that
resulted drove the company’s fast growth around the world.
19
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Uber’s power over supply and demand — the guaranteed, fast,
cheaper-than-a-cab rides that it can offer both customers
and drivers — has been its key competitive advantage against
competing rideshare companies.
As smaller competitors have emerged to challenge Uber in local
markets, Uber’s ability to manipulate its own supply and demand
economics have helped it stay competitive. When fighting Juno
and Gett in New York City, for example, Uber simply upped its driver
incentives and discounted rides for Uber customers. That brought
drivers — some of whom worked for simultaneous services —
back to Uber, where they could make more money. It also brought
customers, who could easily use either service, back as well.
20
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
That strategy has been less effective against Lyft, which has become
increasingly able to offer similar incentives within its marketplace,
competing with Uber on price and driver availability. Since there’s
little friction for drivers or users to switch between apps, there’s little
keeping someone from choosing one app over another.
Ultimately, to win against Lyft, Uber is betting not only on its
marketplace moat, but also reinvesting in its brand, hoping that its
familiarity can give it an edge in a newly commodified rideshare
industry. It is also investing in various other services and verticals
including, such as e-bikes and food delivery.
21
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
4. Data
How Google used its search expertise to
build a wide data moat
Google’s powerful data moat started with a single technological
innovation — better web search — that gave the company a
formula for disrupting a whole range of other services.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the PageRank algorithm
while PhD students at Stanford. Unlike existing site-ranking
algorithms that prioritized sites containing certain keywords,
PageRank assessed a site’s relevance according to the number of
times it had been linked to by other websites.
This relatively simple difference quickly made Google the dominant
internet search engine. By June 2000, it was Yahoo’s new default
for search, and in 2004, the company went public in a deal that
gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23B.
Over time, Google’s dominance over search and the data gathered
from it have allowed the company to build a powerful, durable
competitive advantage in advertising. More than 3.5B searches
take place on Google every day, making it the most popular
website in the world.
Another factor that makes Google attractive for advertisers is
that so many searches are made with the intent to buy a good or
service. Airlines can advertise their flights when people search
“flights to Miami,” bookstores can advertise their hours when
people search “bookstore Brooklyn,” and so on.
22
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Today, Google has about a 37% share of the entire $130B digital
ad market in the United States, according to eMarketer. For
programmatic advertising done through ad servers, Google has
70% market share.
The company’s dominance of advertising is so complete that 48
of 50 US states have decided to launch an antitrust investigation
against the firm, alleging that its control of advertising markets
has led to anti-competitive and harmful effects for consumers.
However, Google isn’t relying solely on its advertising moat to stay
competitive.
The company also leverages its ability to constantly acquire new
data about what people are searching for to improve search and
build further moats in areas like transportation and shopping.
The most powerful differentiator for Google here is that the
company can pair search information with other data sources it
has access to, like mobile location data from the Google app.
The result is a layering of value. Search the name of a business
on Google, and you can quickly see not just what time it’s open,
but what times of day are busiest — data Google has from mobile
users visiting that location.
With its maps products like Waze, Google is constantly recording
where people are on the road, where they’re headed, and how long
it’s taking them to get there, generating a highly accurate real-time
traffic map. When a user encounters a speed trap or slowdown,
that information can then be transmitted to every other user of the
app, making the experience better for everyone.
23
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
The deeper Google penetrates different facets of its users’ lives,
the better it becomes at serving users, and the more personalized
results it can serve up. This personalization makes users less likely
to want to give up that convenience and go to another provider.
Type in “weather” into Google, and you can instantly get a forecast
for your specific area. Type in “movies,” and you’ll see movies
playing near you. Type in “plumber,” and you get a list of plumbers
that are not only local, but “Google Guaranteed” — meaning Google
will reimburse you if the job isn’t done properly.
This data flywheel also feeds Google’s advertising flywheel.
As Google’s involvement in users’ lives gets deeper and more
personalized, the targeting and personalization it can offer
becomes more valuable for advertisers as well.
Google has largely been able to maintain its search superiority,
both by offering “smart personalized results” and by retaining its
status as the built-in browser on as many devices and operating
systems as possible.
However, vulnerabilities in Google’s seach moat have already
appeared. Today, for example, more product searches begin on
Amazon than do on Google.
The main source of potential disruption to Google’s data moat over
the next several years will be companies like Amazon, Yelp, and
Expedia, which aim to offer deeper, more personalized search results.
24
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
5. Platform
The OS ecosystem that made Apple
a $1T company
Apple has famously built a business with huge profit margins in
an industry that’s infamous for being difficult to make a profit in:
mobile phones.
While the iPhone has been hailed for its design and functionality, the
real engine of the iPhone’s success has not been the phone itself,
but the operating system inside it and the ecosystem around it.
The durability and stickiness of the Apple ecosystem comes
down largely to iOS and the ways that it incentivizes users to stick
around.
A first major lever that Apple used to keep people in its ecosystem
was iTunes. The offering kept users around by becoming their
definitive system for digital music, as music bought on iTunes
could only be listened to on iTunes.
Another level was iCloud, which became the clearinghouse for all
personal data. While migrating from iCloud to another service like
Dropbox is possible, it doesn’t make much sense if your primary
computing device is an Apple computer.
Then there’s the App Store, which keeps users around by being the
access point for millions of applications.
On the hardware side, there are products like Apple TV and
AirPods, which become more valuable when you have an iOS
product to connect them to.
25
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Every new product and service in the Apple ecosystem is designed
to drive value for people using iOS and reinforce the value of
staying inside the ecosystem.
The result has been a significant diversification in the products
that Apple sells in large numbers. In January 2019, Apple CEO Tim
Cook announced the company had 1.4B installed devices around
the world between iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple Watch, Mac, and
Apple TV, with only 900M of those being iPhones.
But of all those products, the iPhone still drives a majority of the
company’s revenue, and most of the company’s attention still
comes down to that cash cow.
As the iPhone begins to peak as a revenue driver for Apple,
continuing the company’s platform growth and bringing iOS and
iPhone users into other high-margin products will be a crucial
future strategy for the company.
26
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
6. Platform
How Facebook’s control of the social
graph made it hyper-durable
Facebook is one of the fastest-growing tech companies of all
time, largely because of the power of the network that it’s been
able to build.
When Facebook first launched, there was little individual use to the
tool — it lacked “single-player mode.” The value emerged as the
network grew. The more friends a user had on Facebook, the more
value the user could get out of it.
At first, this value was mostly limited to being able to read friends’
answers to the questionnaire that Facebook gave new users,
browse their Walls, and send “Pokes.”
But Facebook layered more and more value on top of this simple
social register over time, and because it controlled all the data, the
company gained control of a deep moat built on network effects.
The first big feature Facebook added to its platform was Photos,
which instantly became a powerful growth mechanism because of
its tagging functionality. Every time a user uploaded a new photo
and tagged their friends, those people were notified about it.
27
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Not only did these notifications drive users to Facebook to see
photos; it also taught new users how to use Facebook.

“Think about photo tagging on Facebook.
When you get that notification, there is
no way you’re not gonna check it out,
because it’s a picture of you. Meanwhile,
getting that notification teaches you
that tagging photos is possible. Instead
of Facebook explaining that you should
upload photos and tag people, they just
showed you.”

— STAN CHUDNOVSKY, HEAD OF PRODUCT FOR
MESSAGING AT FACEBOOK
28
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Successive features that Facebook added, from Groups to
Messenger, created similar kinds of viral value for Facebook’s
users. They created new triggers to bring new people into the
Facebook ecosystem, such as receiving an invite to a private group
or receiving a message request.
By getting increasingly involved in users’ social activities,
Facebook also decreased the likelihood that its users would ever
be able to leave the platform after joining up.
Today, this dedication to data has led Facebook to acquire other
properties — most importantly Instagram — that use the
Facebook social graph in order to build out users’ network of
friends and followers.
While overall use of Facebook’s core product may be decreasing,
it’s still the biggest social network in America for everyone ages
12 and up, giving the company a competitive advantage when
it comes to launching new products. Instead of having to build
a new product from scratch, Facebook can use its social graph
to compete with virtually anyone — for example, by immediately
releasing copycat features like Instagram Stories to a bigger base
of users than Snapchat had overall.
29
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Many of the biggest and most durable business moats in history
have been built on an advantage related to cost.
While it took GEICO decades to become one of the biggest insurers
in the American market, its massive advantage over other insurers
on cost — achieved by cutting out middlemen and selling insurance
directly to consumers — has today made the company worth
around $50B to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Companies with an advantage on cost can generate several types
of business moats, differentiated mainly by different approaches to
consumer psychology.
SWITCHING COST
Switching cost moats exist when a company sells a product its
users need or trust too much to switch providers.
A company with a switching cost moat can drive its prices (and
profits) upward as long as the cost to the customer does not
exceed the cost of switching to a competing provider. Even in
cases where the cost does exceed the cost of switching, stickiness
(especially in enterprise products) can help defend the moat.
Cost moats
30
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
SUNK COST
Sunk cost moats operate by eliciting a significant one-time or
repeating payment from a customer, the size of which is big enough
to dissuade that customer from leaving for a competitor later.
In this case, a consumer’s perception of “choice” is limited by the
upfront investment they’ve already made in a product, creating
customer lock-in (and an accompanying moat).
COST ADVANTAGE
Cost advantage moats exist when companies build more efficient
manufacturing or distribution and use that to offer lower prices
than competitors.
The power of this type of moat depends largely on how well those
costs come down with scale. If a company can continually lower
prices as they grow, it can create a self-perpetuating circle of
massive growth.
31
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
32
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
7. Switching cost
How IBM used the psychology of fear to
own back-end technology for decades
For more than 50 years, IBM held a competitive advantage built
on fear.
IBM’s dominance in computing, and the paranoia the company
fostered, created a business environment where switching to an
IBM competitor was almost unheard of.
But it took time for the company to find the stability that would
allow it to sell itself as the most reliable vendor in computing. First,
IBM had to invent a mainframe that would make it cost-effective
for companies to stick with it over long periods of time.
The IBM 1401 was the early centerpiece of the company’s
mainframe business. But it had one big problem: it didn’t offer users
enough processing power. To get more, customers had to upgrade,
either to a better IBM machine or to a competitor’s mainframe.
Because IBM systems weren’t interoperable, options were
essentially equivalent from a cost point of view. Either one would
have required users to rewrite all their software.
This was a massive problem for IBM from a business point of
view, because it meant the company would have to prove itself
again with each new iteration of computers that it manufactured.
Customers could easily decide defect to a different mainframe
provider, since buying a new IBM mainframe and going elsewhere
cost the same amount of money.
33
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
To change that, IBM set out on a multi-year project to build a
new, interoperable base mainframe — something that customers
could upgrade to without having to rewrite all their software. Later,
IBM could release updates onto that mainframe, allowing their
customers to add more processing power without having to buy a
whole new machine.
The IBM System/360
The System/360 was IBM’s most successful computer ever, and a
massive inflection point for computing as a whole. A month after
release, more than 100,000 were purchased around the world. (For
context, at the beginning of that year, there had only been about
20,000 total computers installed in the UK, Western Europe, the US,
and Japan, according to the IEE.)
34
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Not only did the System/360 give companies that were considering
competitors a reason to instead stick with IBM; it also made
computers more accessible for companies that hadn’t yet taken
the plunge, since they could now buy a smaller System/360,
assured that they would be able to upgrade later if necessary.
Suddenly, choosing — and staying with — IBM became the logical
decision for data centers and purchasing departments around the
world. And over time, IBM developed a sales strategy that drove
home that logic, leveraging IBM’s size and reputation to great effect.
That strategy, as explained by chief System/360 architect Gene
Amdahl, was all about creating “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”
Salespeople would explain to leads that they would never be
criticized or questioned for sticking with IBM, and that their
other peripherals and equipment might not work with a non-IBM
mainframe.
As software developer Eric S. Raymond explains:
“The implicit coercion was traditionally
accomplished by promising that Good
Things would happen to people who stuck
with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over
the future of competitors’ equipment
or software.”
35
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
This strategy drove customers away from competitors and back
to IBM. But none of it would ever have been possible if IBM had
continued playing the same game it was playing in the early 1960s,
competing with other manufacturers to build the best possible
mainframe with each new release cycle. With the System/360, IBM
became more than a mainframe manufacturer — it became the
dominant developer of operating systems, software, applications,
and services.
It’s no coincidence that IBM’s greatest struggles since have come
with the introduction of cloud computing, which has made operating
systems, software, applications and services into a commodity.
While IBM CEO Sam Palmisano declared in 2010 that you
couldn’t do what IBM was doing in the cloud, today businesses
are increasingly turning to cloud services and technologies from
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, suggesting some weaknesses in
IBM’s switching cost moat.
36
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
8. Switching cost
Why ADP is still America’s biggest
payroll services provider
Automatic Data Processing (ADP) is one of the largest human
resource management companies in the world, with almost
750,000 clients around the world.
It also has a deep switching cost moat that has given it a highly
privileged position in its market.
Today, ADP has to spend only 1.5% of its more than $13B in yearly
revenue to run its business.
ADP has become indispensable to thousands of businesses
around the world mainly because it handles two of the most
mission-critical tasks inside an organization: payroll and taxes.
In addition to handling compliance and reporting, ADP offers
various other value-add services (like freelancer management),
which further embed customers in the ADP ecosystem.
Handling payroll and taxes means there’s an inherent element
of switching aversion at play — companies that trust ADP to
handle their most sensitive documents are going to have a higher
threshold for switching than they would with a less mission-
critical relationship.
Another factor protecting ADP’s moat is the fact that over the last
15 years, both payroll and taxes have become significantly more
complex, increasing the likelihood that businesses will want to
come to a company like ADP to minimize their risk.
37
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
ADP’s customers trust ADP to keep them in compliance with
complex legislation like the Affordable Care Act. The increasing
complexity of compliance creates an IBM-like response to the
question of payroll: “No one ever got fired for buying ADP.”
However, threats to ADP’s dominance are emerging.
One is that the cost advantage ADP once enjoyed has lessened,
with new players like Gusto and Intuit emerging with lower-cost
models designed to attract smaller companies and startups to
their payroll platforms.
The other is the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated payroll
software, making ADP’s value proposition of helping companies
navigate the complexities of payroll less and less valuable.
While the switching cost moat has helped ADP maintain its
profitability and growth, it isn’t impenetrable. Today, the two ends of
the size spectrum see most defections from ADP: either from small
businesses that won’t incur much cost from switching, or from huge
businesses that can negotiate better rates with other providers.
38
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
9. Sunk cost
The business model that made
Gillette a $57B company
When Gillette first started selling its safety razors with disposable
blades in 1903, the innovation of replaceable blades immediately
made shaving more convenient, eliminating the need to send razor
blades for sharpening.
It was also the beginning of a powerful business model, built on
the principle of sunk cost.
The “razor blade business model,” as it is now known, refers to any
business that operates on a combination of low- and high-margin
purchases. A low-margin product is priced low enough to attract
as many people as possible, while a high-margin product is priced
just high enough to create healthy profits.
Repetition is the key here. After a customer makes the low-margin
purchase, they must make the high-margin purchase continuously.
The initial investment psychologically primes customers to keep
buying because they’ve already spent money, limiting consumers’
theory of their own choice.
In other words, people who buy cheap Gillette razors tend to keep
buying Gillette blades. Over time, because those customers keep
generating high-margin revenue and have an in-built tendency to
stick around, a moat is created.
Protecting that moat means reinforcing the value of the product
and the brand name, which Gillette has done largely through
offering new products.
39
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
New razor systems serve a dual purpose for Gillette. First, they
reinforce the value of the Gillette razor, encouraging people to
maintain the investment they keep making in the products. Second,
each iteration that increases the number of blades generates a
new, more expensive blade that can drive more revenue.
Gillette has also sought to protect its moat through advertising.
Since the 1930s, Gillette has been one of the biggest names in
advertising, especially through sponsorships of US sports.
However, Gillette didn’t pursue a razor-and-blades strategy in
its earliest years. Instead, it priced both its razor and blades at a
high cost. It took the expiration of Gillette’s razor patents and the
subsequent emergence of new competition for the company to
pivot into the strategy that would make it successful.
A hundred years after the first Gillette razors appeared on the
market, Gillette was still the clear market leader in the space,
selling about 5x as many razors as any other company.
However, Gillette still faces several challenges in the years to come.
One challenge is cultural. There is less social pressure to shave, for
both men and women, than at virtually any time since Gillette was
founded. As a result, the shaving and hair removal tools market
fell an estimated 4% in 2018 year-over-year and is expected to
be stagnant for about the next half-decade, according to market
research firm Mintel.
The other major threat Gillette faces is competition with new
kinds of business models that don’t rely on sunken costs — most
notably, Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s.
40
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Because these startups sell blades directly to consumers rather
than primarily through retail, they have been able to sell at a lower
cost than Gillette and other big-box competitors. In 2017, Gillette
decided to cut its own prices about 12% on average, apologizing to
consumers in a corporate blog post.
Ultimately, while Gillette is still the largest force by market share in
shaving, it is no longer the only powerful player, nor the one with
the most momentum: Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for $1B
in 2016, and Harry’s was sold to Schick for $1.4B in 2019.
41
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
10. Cost advantage
Why Geico going D2C made it
Warren Buffett’s favorite stock
The Government Employees Insurance Company was founded
in 1936 to sell insurance to government employees, which were
considered a less risky pool of customers than the general public.
From this simple beginning came a critical business model
decision. Because GEICO’s target market was so small, founders
Leo and Lillian Goodwin decided they should market directly to
consumers via mail rather than through brokers, as was traditional.
The basic advantage that GEICO discovered was that marketing
directly to consumers gave the company a significant amount of
leverage on price. Over the next several decades, the decision to
go direct-to-consumer would propel GEICO to become the fifth-
largest auto insurer in the country.
“The ultimate key to [GEICO]‘s success is
its rock-bottom operating costs, which
virtually no competitor can match.”

— WARREN BUFFETT
Those rock bottom operating costs were passed along to
consumers, driving GEICO’s growth in the 60s. The company hit
a million policyholders in 1964, $150M in insurance premiums in
1965, and $13M in net earnings in 1966.
42
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
GEICO suffered some blowback from its aggressive growth in the
ensuing decades, but the company’s policyholder count recovered
to hit 8M by 2007.
GEICO’s main value proposition was always the fact that it could
offer a lower cost on a commoditized product. With auto insurance,
most buyers’ primary consideration is saving money.
One of the first changes that Buffett enforced after Berkshire
Hathaway finished its acquisition of the company in 1995 was
increased spend on advertising. The idea was that to protect its
cost advantage moat, the company should invest in brand, building
an emotional connection with customers to ensure that it remains
the top-of-mind choice for low-cost car insurance.
The head start GEICO gained through its marketing and pricing
strategy has allowed it to spend more freely than any of its
competitors. In 2011, GEICO spent 6.5% of its premiums on ads.
(Of the other 5 biggest car insurers, none spent more than 5%.)
Progressive, the other major direct-to-consumer insurer that
spends heavily on advertising for brand awareness, continues to
be the company’s biggest competitor.
43
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
11. Cost advantage
How Amazon Web Services built an
impenetrable economy of scale
Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a big head start in developing a
cloud platform over its competitors.
AWS publicly launched in 2006 — 2 years before Google launched
its competing Cloud, and 4 years before Microsoft launched Azure.
That head start paid off.
Today, roughly a third of activity on the internet takes place on
AWS-hosted sites, and the service generates more than $25B a
year in revenue.
The original idea of AWS was to take all of the back-end
infrastructure and server work needed to create a website or internet
service — things like image and video storage — and make them
easy and affordable for anyone looking to build on the internet.
AWS is a business that benefits from scale. The more servers under
Amazon’s control, the cheaper its own computing and storage, and
the cheaper the computing and storage it sells to customers.
Over time, the business has expanded to encompass more and
more services. Its dominance of cloud computing isn’t about
being first or being cheapest anymore — it’s about having access
to more than 140 different AWS products, from analytics and
augmented/virtual reality to security, machine learning, and
robotics. AWS customers can access all of these, and integrating
them is also significantly easier since they already run the rest of
their stack on Amazon.
44
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
While Google and Microsoft can compete with Amazon on price
today, they can’t provide that same volume of easily integrated,
reliable, comprehensive services.
Google and Azure have many of the same services to offer, but
if a company has its data on AWS already, it is more likely to use
Amazon’s tools.
There’s a switching cost moat at play here for Amazon as well.
Switching from a cloud provider like AWS to one like Google Cloud
can be a very difficult transition depending on how many provider-
specific services you’re dependent on — AWS banks on that.
Ultimately, being both low-cost and high-capability gives Amazon
a highly advantageous position. Most importantly, this is an
industry that’s still at the beginning of its growth curve.
In 2019, Amazon actually strengthened its cloud advantage,
growing its market share to 47% compared to 22% for Azure, 8%
for Alibaba, and 7% for Google Cloud.
45
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Not all companies build moats from structural factors like cost or
network effects. While these are powerful ways to keep customers
around and fend off competitors, huge companies have been built
off intangible factors like brand and tradition as well.
BRAND-BASED
Brand-based business moats protect a company from
competition through some kind of unique value proposition,
culture, and messaging.
With a strong, recognizable, and valued brand, companies can get
their customers to pay a premium for their products and come
back for repeat purchases — a powerful moat generator especially
for companies selling a commodity.
When a company has a sufficiently powerful brand, it has pricing
power because its customers buy based on something beyond
price — they buy based on the signaling function of the purchase,
and/or because of cultural forces beyond that individual’s control.
Cultural moats
46
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
TRADITION-BASED
Tradition-based business moats protect a company through the
values and beliefs of the culture around that company.
Some products become deeply embedded in a culture but don’t
have a primary supplier, meaning they’re impossible to build a
moat around.
Some products, however, continue under patent or tradition to only
be produced by a single company, like the situation with Marmite
in the United Kingdom. With these kinds of products, companies
can sustain a moat solely driven by the culture around them and
its need to use or consume their product.
47
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
48
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
12. Brand
How Patagonia grew by understanding
its customer identity
The outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia is well known for its
commitment to environmental and sustainable causes.
Environmentalism is core to Patagonia’s mission — 1% of all of
Patagonia’s gross sales are donated to different environmental groups,
and the company encourages other businesses to do the same.
In April 2019, the company went so far as to halt its custom
manufacturing and sales of vests to companies in finance — an
industry which had taken up Patagonia as a kind of uniform,
despite the company’s apparent wishes.
The love of the outdoors is core to Patagonia’s marketing.
Patagonia’s strong public commitment to this mission has allowed
it to acquire a customer base that shops with Patagonia in part
because they share the brand’s values.
Patagonia’s brand works as a moat because it is so specifically
tailored for its core audience of buyers. If you care deeply about
the outdoors, you’re likely to spend more time outdoors, which in
turn means you’re likely to buy the high quality outdoors products
Patagonia sells.
Brands like Patagonia grow more powerful moats over time,
because consumers judge the virtue and ethics of a brand partly
by how long it has been consistent. Patagonia has supported
environmental groups for more than forty years, and has been at
the cutting edge of sustainable causes.
49
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
“We went organic in 1996. … We learned
how to make fleece jackets from recycled
plastic bottles and then how to make
fleece jackets from fleece jackets. We
examined our use of paper in catalogs,
the sources of our electricity, the amount
of oil we consumed driving to work… [I]
t’s part of the cost of doing business,
part of our effort to balance (however
imperfectly) the impact we have on
natural systems.“
— PATAGONIA
This doubling down on the commitment to sustainability is part
of what turned the company around from its darkest hour in the
early 1990s.
At the time, Patagonia had to lay off a fifth of its workforce, and
founder Yvon Chouinard considered selling the business.
Instead of selling, Chouinard spent the next several years looking for
ways to bring the company closer in line with its sustainable ethos.
For Black Friday 2011, Patagonia completed a “Don’t Buy This
Jacket” campaign: as a result, that Black Friday Patagonia’s sales
rose 42%.
50
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies

By 2014, Patagonia was up to $500M a year in revenue. As of 2018,
that figure was above $1B.
While some have criticized Patagonia for being too forthright about
its political stances, the growth of Patagonia’s outspoken brand and
its embrace of more sustainable development processes have both
coincided with the company’s massive success — and the creation
of a significant moat around the company’s cultural mission.
As Patagonia grows, it could be challenging for the company
to maintain the same clarity and purity of mission — especially
as both bigger brands and new, smaller D2C brands tout
sustainable practices.
51
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
13. Brand
Why consistency has been key to
Coca-Cola’s success
If one ingredient of a powerful brand is time, another equally
important ingredient is consistency.
Consistency creates a unified experience that is powerful for
building a brand — one great example is Coca-Cola.
In 2019, Forbes calculated Coca-Cola’s brand value at about
$59.2B, the only non-tech company in its top 7 brands overall.
While Coca-Cola’s use of sponsorship and advertising is important
to its success, its consistency in product is just as important.
Coca-Cola turned its soda into one of the biggest brands in the
world largely by manufacturing and shipping the same product
to customers all around the world, years before logistics and
infrastructure would make this an easy task.
The Coca-Cola brand differentiation began with its bottle, which
was designed with a highly unusual contour for the time in order to
shape the perception that it was a premium product.
The Coca-Cola brand extended to the way that the drink was
stored, how it traveled, and how it looked on store shelves. Coca-
Cola insisted that bottles of Coke needed to be served at no more
than 40 degrees, and sent its own salespeople out to new stores
carrying Coca-Cola to ensure compliance.
The bottling and distribution strategy that Coca-Cola pursued in
these early years was defined by the desire to give every consumer
the same, optimal experience every time they tried it.
52
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Advertising let Coca-Cola promote the idea of that consistent
experience around the world — but it was ultimately its
commitment to standards, distribution, and logistics that allowed
it to deliver on it.
Since the 1960s, Coca-Cola’s ability to deliver a consistent and
beloved brand experience has also led it to experiment with new,
potentially moat-reinforcing products.
Some of these have been duds, including a Mountain Dew
competitor launched in 1969 called Simba and the company’s 1985
reformulation of the original Coke recipe, codenamed “New Coke.”
After the introduction of “New Coke” in 1985, Pepsi actually briefly
overtook Coke as the most popular beverage on the American
market — though Coke quickly retook the top spot after it
reintroduced “Coca-Cola Classic.”
Other side products developed by Coca-Cola have been highly
successful and have helped vastly diversify the Coca-Cola brand’s
offerings into juice, water, and other types of carbonated sodas,
including Sprite, Fanta, Tab, Powerade, Nestea, and Dasani.
Coca-Cola’s moat has been challenged by competitors over the
years, most notably by PepsiCo, though these two companies have
tended to target slightly different niches.
Today, less than 50% of PepsiCo’s revenues come from beverages,
with most of the company’s business coming from the company’s
food and snack partnerships.
53
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
14. Brand
How Starbucks changed Americans’
relationship with their coffee
Before Starbucks, the American coffee industry was dominated by
19th century brands like Folgers and Maxwell House: cheap beans,
stale coffee, and packaging meant to extend shelf life indefinitely.
Starbucks didn’t just introduce higher-quality European roasting
and brewing practices to the American public — it became
synonymous with premier, sustainable coffee, and produced a
durable competitive advantage in the process.
From the company’s earliest days, Starbucks worked to make its
brand synonymous with luxury and sophistication.
It outfitted its cafes with vintage furniture and European decor, and
gave its drinks & cup sizes exotic-sounding names.
As Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron write in Cultural Strategy,
“Starbucks worked because it got the cultural expression right —
sophistication conveyed by the right ideology, myth, and cultural
codes to resonate with the new cultural-capital cohort in 1990’s
54
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
America. When a prospect walked in the door and placed an order,
she was engulfed in a very accessible artisanal-cosmopolitan
experience that made her feel more sophisticated than if she had
bought a coffee from a competitor.”
Starbucks built itself a powerful moat by upgrading coffee from
something Americans consumed to something they could enjoy
consuming, and be seen by others consuming.
It did this both by focusing on quality more than previous
American coffee companies — many of which had previously
mixed their ground coffees with cheaper beans to save on costs
— and by framing the experience of visiting a Starbucks cafe in a
more sophisticated manner.
Today, Starbucks ranks as the second most valuable restaurant
brand in the world, falling behind only McDonald’s, according
to Forbes. As premium coffee has become more popular and
commoditized in the United States and across Europe, however,
Starbucks has looked to the Starbucks Rewards membership
program as a new moat.
Originally, becoming a Starbucks Rewards member was the only
way to use Starbucks’ popular mobile ordering, pick-up, and
payment app — today, while mobile ordering is available to non-
members, it still offers Reward users free brewed coffee and tea
refills, exclusive offers, and rewards.
In 2018, in a sign that the company’s strategy was succeeding,
Starbucks announced that Starbucks Rewards purchases
represented 36% of the company’s total orders.
55
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
15. Tradition
How Marmite became condiment
king in the UK
Marmite, a British-made food spread made from yeast, was first
invented in 1902. The slogan for the Unilever product — “Love it or
hate it” — says it all about the brand’s key competitive advantage
over other food spreads in the market. While it has its detractors,
Marmite is culturally embedded in the country.
Tradition-based moats are rare and difficult to build, but much of
Marmite’s origins relate to war.
Marmite is a good source of vitamin B, thiamin, riboflavin, and folic
acid, so it became a standard military ration designed to combat a
common deficiency in British soldiers during both WW1 and WW2.
It was also used as a healthy snack for babies. The widespread
use of Marmite cemented its place in the British home.
56
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
The product had several inherent factors that helped it achieve
ubiquity in its earliest days and become a mainstay of the culture.
In addition to its health properties, Marmite doesn’t need to be
refrigerated, and has a long shelf life.
Today, the product is still an iconic British good. The product
itself still bears traces of its origins, which reinforce its status as
a traditional product and something inherent to the culture of its
surroundings. For example, it is still sold in its iconic jar, which
features a French “marmite,” or casserole dish. But Marmite’s also
been integrated and updated, like Jamie Oliver’s recipe for Marmite
popcorn and a release of Marmite-flavored chocolate.
57
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Some companies don’t build moats through their products or
brands. Instead, they leverage internal expertise, patents, and/or
legal protections.
Resources unique to a company in one way or another — whether
in the form of intellectual property gained through R&D, internal
knowledge, or a monopoly — have built some of the world’s most
and least durable moats.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
IP moats work because a company develops some kind of
valuable intellectual property that its competition, structurally,
cannot replicate and use.
While patents won’t always protect a company from a much bigger
competitor, especially if it takes longer for them to commercialize
their drug or technology, a patent in fields like pharmaceuticals
can produce a powerfully durable competitive advantage.
KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge moats work by concentrating valuable expertise within
a single organization.
Many forms of knowledge, however, can easily be transferred, lost
through brain drain, or imitated — companies that want to build a
moat based on their knowledge need a way to fend off competitors
until they can reach a point of critical mass.
Resource moats
58
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
REGULATORY
Regulatory moats work by giving a company protection from
competitors through legal channels, including regulations
preventing new competitors or through a contract with a bigger,
more durable company.
These kinds of moats can be durable as long as the political
leadership of the country, or leadership of the company, choose to
maintain that arrangement.
59
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
60
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
16. IP
How Pfizer turned Lipitor into the
best-selling drug in the world
One of the few ways to build a business moat is through
patent law.
When Pfizer spent $90B to purchase competing drug
manufacturer Warner-Lambert, building a patent-protected moat
was the main objective of the acquisition.
The crown jewel of Warner-Lambert’s development efforts, Lipitor,
had just recently been discovered to reduce the amount of bad
cholesterol in patients better than any existing statin drug.
While Pfizer first partnered with Warner-Lambert to help market
and do late-stage testing on the drug, the company eventually
made the decision to acquire Warner-Lambert (which had already
received significant buyout interest from other drug companies).
61
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Because Pfizer owned the company that had a patent on the drug,
it was virtually invincible: Lipitor’s breakaway success made it
unlikely that investors would attempt to fund a better product (a
risky proposition) while no other company would be able to sell
Lipitor or a generic version.
Pfizer was also helped by a few factors outside of its direct control.
For one, there was the FDA’s decision in 1997 allowing drug
companies to run ads for consumers. Ads promoting Lipitor helped
make the drug a household name and drive sales even higher.
There was also a push to lower federal standards for healthy amounts
of cholesterol in the body, a movement spearheaded by health groups
that qualified more Americans for cholesterol medications.
Over the course of its 14.5 year patent, Lipitor would generate
$125B in sales, producing 20-25% of Pfizer’s total revenues for
several years and making Lipitor the best-selling prescription drug
of all time.
The difficulty with patents, of course, is that they expire. Drug
companies like Pfizer must defend their claim to exclusive
development rights against other companies that want to
manufacture a cheaper, generic version of the drug — in 2009,
Pfizer successfully extended the issuance of its patent on Lipitor
to the end of 2011.
When Pfizer’s patent protection on Lipitor ended, it opened the
floodgates for cheaper generics to flood the market. Pfizer,
however, has fared better with Lipitor than most drug companies
that lose its patent-protected cash cow.
62
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
It takes just six months for a drug to lose 80% of its sales after a
generic replacement becomes available, according to IMS.
Even after its patent on Lipitor expired in the US, Pfizer’s effective
advertising, continued research into the success of the drug, and
deals cut with insurers and PBMs have allowed it to be a profitable
business for the company — though never quite as powerful as
when it had exclusive rights to its sale. Still, Pfizer’s patent on
Lipitor is still active in some countries, where exclusive sales
continue for the company.
Today, thanks to these countermeasures, and particularly the
drug’s success in China, Lipitor still generates about $1.5B a year
in sales for the company.
63
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
17. IP
The universe of characters that
made Disney a $230B company
Intellectual property isn’t the most common differentiator for
media companies, which usually rely on competitive advantages
like their brand or their cultural prestige.
But few companies in any industry boast intellectual property
moats as deep and as protective as The Walt Disney Company.
Disney today is the most dominant company in Hollywood, with
a 35% market share on all movie tickets sold. In 2019, each of the
top 5 grossing films so far has been built on Disney intellectual
property: Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, Toy Story 4, Captain
Marvel, and Spider-Man: Far From Home.
This dominance didn’t emerge overnight. Over the last several
decades, Disney has spent billions acquiring other companies
with valuable IP (Lucasfilm, Pixar, ESPN, Fox) as well as on
lobbying efforts to protect its vast library of intellectual property
from having its copyright expire.
As such, the law has been changed to allow for new media products
to be automatically copyrighted upon their creation, a decision that
has created built-in protection for new Disney properties.
64
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies


Source: Priceonomics
Under the standards of the copyright laws that existed when
Mickey Mouse was first invented, the cartoon mouse should have
entered the public domain and become available for any creative
work to use freely in 1984.
Disney’s lobbying got Mickey Mouse’s copyright deadline
extended another 19 years, protecting him until 2003. A few years
before that deadline was set to hit, Disney lobbied successfully
for another extension, protecting Mickey Mouse as Disney’s
intellectual property until 2023.
As a result, no studios or companies can make any kind of content
containing any iteration of Mickey Mouse — or any of the other
valuable characters that Disney owns — creating a moat, protected
by law, around Disney’s media universe.
Today, the amount of original content that Disney creates,
compared to the amount of spin-offs and remakes and sequels
based on existing IP, is marginal.
65
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
As film critic Mark Harris puts it:
“Studio heads always used to say of their tentpoles and franchises
that their profits financed smaller-scale gambles, risks, originals.
Disney is the first studio to drop that pretense. It is the sum of its
brands, and its brands finance its brands.”
66
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
18. Knowledge
How Canon turned its technical
expertise into a compounding benefit
Today, Canon is best known for its imaging products, including
digital cameras and camcorders. But Canon’s technical expertise
with small-scale electronics and optical imagery have also made
it a powerful competitor in the business copying market.
Canon introduced the world’s first personal, mini-copiers in 1982.
Until this release, Canon had been a camera company struggling
to break into the more lucrative world of business machines.
Five years later, 74% of Canon’s revenues would come from its
business machines division.
The primary advantage that Canon cultivated over other business
machine companies was internal engineering expertise —
specifically, the ability to design a miniaturized copier drum.
It used that expertise to develop the copy machines, but then
leveraged that knowledge to gain a powerful competitive position
in the rest of the business machines market in the 1980s.
67
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
The drum is the central component of the copier, responsible for
magnetically attracting toner and then projecting an image onto
the paper as it rotates. Before Canon’s innovation, copier drums
tended to be big, expensive, and difficult to repair.
The size — and lack of durability — of the traditional copier drum
made a miniature version of the office copier virtually impossible
to build cheaply.
However, Canon figured it out when team leader Hiroshi Tanaka
took his product team out for beers and asked why a copier drum
couldn’t be made using the same process used to make a beer can
— in other words, could it be cheap and disposable.
As Tanaka’s team worked to devise a new low cost, disposable
aluminum copier drum, they pioneered several new technologies
related to miniaturization, manufacturing & assembly, and the
reduction of component weight.
The highly advanced team of more than 3,000 engineers had
largely been built out during the company’s previous attempts to
break into business machines.
The copiers that resulted from Canon’s investment in R&D were
quick and smaller than any copier before, and quickly became
popular in both Europe and North America, dominating the
consumer market and low end of the business market.
While all that work paid off in developing the mini-copier, these
same technological breakthroughs also directly helped the
company develop other technologies, including typewriters,
microfilm readers, and the laser printers that would soon become
its biggest and best cash cow.
68
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Canon today is still a market leader in the business copier market,
but there are significant headwinds for the company to deal
with to stay relevant in the years ahead. Corporate spending on
printing and hardware is down, with digitization of documents up
and business behaviors changing. Canon, in turn, is reframing its
core business model to exclude copiers — and the company says
that it plans to focus in the future mainly on cameras, commercial
printing, nanoimprint technology, and medical products.
69
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
19. Regulatory
How the Kingsbury Commitment
gave AT&T a 71-year monopoly
For much of the 20th century, the telephone system in the US was
operated by one company: AT&T.
In the early years of the AT&T monopoly, the only way to access a
telephone was to pay AT&T a subscription fee. Once AT&T set up
your equipment, you could start using your new rented phone, but
only through the company’s network.
AT&T built this monopoly mostly by acquiring many of the local,
independent telephone networks that had emerged in the early
years of the telephone.
Since AT&T controlled the strongest nationwide network, the
company had powerful leverage. Many small networks were
reliant on one another to link out to larger exchanges — by
acquiring these “hub” exchanges, AT&T could systematically cut
small independents out of the network.

A map of AT&T’s network from 1891.
70
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
In 1913, under government scrutiny of this vertical integration
strategy, AT&T cut a deal to prevent being broken up.
The result was the Kingsbury Commitment, an out-of-court
settlement that required AT&T to allow small, independent phone
networks to connect with its nationwide long-distance network.
Despite this settlement, however, AT&T still managed to
consolidate control of the country’s telephone industry and run it
nearly unimpeded until the 1980s.
While the Kingsbury Commitment forced AT&T to let local
providers link to its long-distance network, it did not force AT&T
to connect its local service with other independent providers, nor
did it force AT&T to integrate with other independent long-distance
networks.
Crucially, it also did not require AT&T to connect with local
providers granted AT&T and the independent exchange were less
than 50 miles from one another.
When those small connecting stations tried to connect to the AT&T
network — as the Kingsbury Commitment had insisted they could
— they found that each step of the process brought additional,
untenable costs and hassle.
The result of this difficulty was that over the years following
the Kingsbury Commitment, the number of active, independent
telephone connecting stations decreased, and the number of
stations connected to the AT&T network increased only marginally.
AT&T was free from further antitrust scrutiny for several years,
and just 7 years later, regained the ability to acquire independent
telephone networks.
71
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
In the end, instead of protecting local businesses and competition,
the Kingsbury Commitment’s sanctions only preserved the
competitive advantage that AT&T had built — and gave the
company the green light to build it out further.
Over the next several decades, AT&T would use this regulatory
oversight and other legislation passed in its favor to consolidate
its control of both long-distance traffic and the nation’s local
telephone systems.
AT&T’s dominance would last until 1984, when the many
companies in the Bell System were officially broken up and turned
into “Regional Holding Companies,” causing a 70% drop in the
book value of AT&T.
AT&T’s “Baby Bells” have been successful companies on their
own. In 2005, AT&T itself was purchased for $16B by SBC
Communications (formerly Southwestern Bell), one of the several
Regional Bell Operating Companies that had been created as a
result of the break up.
While AT&T was prevented from acquiring T-Mobile in 2011, the
new AT&T company purchased DirecTV for a total of $67B a few
years later, and in 2018, the company was given permission to buy
Time Warner in a deal valued at about $85B.
Today, as a result of those acquisitions, AT&T is tied for the world’s
largest telecom company, and is the twelfth largest company in the
world overall.
72
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
Virtually every company is built on some kind of advantage:
an entrepreneur uncovers some kind of inefficiency in the
marketplace and then exploits it. But lasting companies are
built on moats — on structural advantages that make it difficult
for other companies to come in and repeat that same original
discovery.
In this way, the moats of today mirror many of the foundational
corporate moats from the past. Facebook, Amazon, and Google
look different, but they have harnessed many of the same types
of structural advantages as companies like Standard Oil, General
Electric, and IBM.
But while they may harness similar advantages to size and
scale, they do it in a new way: using data, network effects, online
marketplaces, search, and social networks.
However, how durable these new moats will prove to be over the
next century is an open question.
The new moats
73
19 Business Moats That Helped Shape
The World’s Most Massive Companies
This report was created with data from the CB Insights’ emerging
technology insights platform, which offers insights into emerging
tech and new business strategies through tools like:
• Earnings Transcripts Search Engine & Analytics to get an
information edge on competitors’ and incumbents’ strategies
• Patent Analytics to see where innovation is happening next
• Company Mosaic Scores to evaluate startup health, based on
our National Science Foundation-backed algorithm
• Company Profiles to quickly see a company’s funding history,
financials, M&A activity, competitors, partners, and more
• Market Sizing Tools to visualize market growth and spot the
next big opportunity
If you aren’t already a client, sign up for a free trial to learn more
about our platform.
The CB Insights platform
has the underlying data
included in this report
WHERE IS ALL THIS DATA FROM?
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR FREE