LOW vs ICE Comparison

Lowe's is the second-largest home improvement retailer globally, with more than 1,750 stores in the US, after the 2023 divestiture of its Canadian locations. The firm's stores offer products and services for home decorating, maintenance, repair, and remodeling, with maintenance and repair accounting for two-thirds of products sold. Lowe's primarily targets retail do-it-yourself (around 70% of sales) and do-it-for-me customers, but has expanded its professional business clients to 30% from less than 20% in the past seven years (set to expand further with the acquisition of FBM). We estimate Lowe's captures a high-single-digit share of the domestic home improvement market, based on US Census data and management's market size estimates.

Intercontinental Exchange is a vertically integrated operator of financial exchanges and provides ancillary data products. Though the company is probably best known for its ownership of the New York Stock Exchange, which it acquired in 2013, ICE operates a large derivatives exchange, too. The company's largest commodity futures product is the ICE Brent crude futures contract. In addition to the exchanges business, which is about 54% of net revenue, Intercontinental Exchange has used a series of acquisitions to create its mortgage technology business (22% of net revenue) and fixed-income and data-services segment (24% of net revenue).