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Back of Napkin

Gartner, Inc. IT

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The bet you're really making is that big companies keep paying Gartner every year for its research subscriptions, the analyst reports and calls that IT bosses lean on to decide what software and hardware to buy. You're betting they keep renewing even as the US government, a large Gartner customer, cuts spending, and even as ChatGPT-style tools tempt people to skip the human analyst. Right now it is mixed: profit rose 14% and per-share profit jumped a third, because Gartner is buying back huge blocks of its own stock, but the core research business grew only 2%. You pay about 17 times earnings, less than the stock has fetched in any of the last twelve years.

Key data

Price$186.42
52-week range$124.25 - $265.85
P/E (TTM / FY2028E)16.7x / 9.9x
EV/EBITDA10.7x

IT · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$94$216$337$459$581 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Gartner sells opinions on a subscription. Its Research arm, 77% of revenue, publishes the analyst reports and rankings, the Magic Quadrants, that enterprise technology buyers use to shortlist vendors and then defend those choices to their boards. A seat runs into the tens of thousands of dollars a year. The other two pieces are Conferences, the Symposium/Xpo events that pack into the fourth quarter, and a shrinking Consulting arm. The moat is workflow: once a company's IT buying runs through Gartner seats and inquiries, ripping them out means re-teaching the whole organization how it decides, so renewals historically sit near or above 100% of prior contract value. That stickiness is the entire story, and it is exactly what the market now doubts.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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