Akamai Technologies (AKAM)
Key Statistics
EV/EBIT = 30.5x
ROE = 9.82%
Debt/Equity = 101%
FCF Yield = 8.3%
Dividend Yield = 0%
Market Cap = $11.12 billion
The Company
Akamai Technologies (AKAM) works behind the scenes to make the internet faster, safer, and more reliable. While you might not see its name as a consumer, if you’ve streamed a video, shopped online, or logged into a secure website, you’ve probably benefited from Akamai’s technology.
Akamai operates three core services: security, delivery, and compute. These services help companies deliver digital content like videos or websites, protect against cyber threats, and run powerful software applications in the cloud.
The company started by making the internet faster through a content delivery network. A content delivery network, or CDN, is a system of servers around the world that stores and delivers web content—like images, videos, and web pages—closer to where users are located. This helps websites load faster and stay online even when traffic spikes.
Today, Akamai does much more than content delivery. It now focuses heavily on cybersecurity and cloud computing, which together account for about two-thirds of its revenue.
Akamai was born at MIT in the late 1990s. The idea came from a challenge posed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who wanted a better way to manage internet traffic. Professor Tom Leighton and graduate student Daniel Lewin developed a system to solve the problem using a method called consistent hashing, which helps distribute data more evenly across servers.