Critical Contrast: Lucas GC (NASDAQ:LGCL) & VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET)

Lucas GC (NASDAQ:LGCL) and VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) are both small-cap business services companies, but which is the better business? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, profitability, valuation, risk, dividends and earnings.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Lucas GC and VNET Group”s gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Lucas GC	$207.60 million	0.40	$10.94 million	N/A	N/A
VNET Group	$1.04 billion	0.85	-$372.38 million	($2.34)	-1.47

Lucas GC has higher earnings, but lower revenue than VNET Group.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

72.8% of VNET Group shares are owned by institutional investors. 12.1% of VNET Group shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares Lucas GC and VNET Group’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Lucas GC	N/A	N/A	N/A
VNET Group	-34.62%	-11.44%	-2.57%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for Lucas GC and VNET Group, as reported by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Lucas GC	0	0	0	0	0.00
VNET Group	0	0	3	1	3.25

VNET Group has a consensus target price of $3.97, indicating a potential upside of 14.98%. Given VNET Group’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe VNET Group is more favorable than Lucas GC.

Summary

VNET Group beats Lucas GC on 8 of the 12 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Lucas GC

Lucas GC Limited, through its subsidiaries, provides online agent-centric human capital management services based on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in the People’s Republic of China. Its Star Career and Columbus platforms enables registered users to receive customized job recommendations and work as talent scouts to source suitable candidates for its corporate customers through their social network, as well as receive trainings and other value-added services. The company’s platform provides permanent and flexible employment recruitment services; outsourcing services primarily for technology-related projects to design, develop, and deliver the projects within budget and on time with acceptable quality; information technology services to generate sales leads for its corporate customers; and training services comprising career-related certification programs. In addition, it engages in the media and entertainment business, as well as provides management consulting services. Lucas GC Limited was founded in 2011 and is based in Beijing, China. Lucas GC Limited operates as a subsidiary of HTL Lucky Holding Limited.

About VNET Group

VNET Group, Inc., an investment holding company, provides hosting and related services in China. It offers managed hosting services consisting of managed retail services, such as colocation services that dedicate data center space to house customers' servers and networking equipment, as well as allow customers to lease partial or entire cabinets for their servers; interconnectivity services that allow customers to connect their servers; value-added services, including hybrid IT, bare metal, firewall, server load balancing, data backup and recovery, data center management, server management, and backup server services; cloud services that allow customers to run applications over the internet using IT infrastructure; and VPN Services that extend customers' private networks by setting up connections through the public internet. The company also provides server administration services, such as operating system support and assistance with updates, server monitoring, server backup and restoration, server security evaluation, firewall services, and disaster recovery services. It serves information technology and cloud services, communications and social networking, gaming and entertainment, e-commerce, automobile, financial services, and blue-chip and small-to-mid-sized enterprises; government agencies; individuals; and telecommunication carriers. The company was formerly known as 21Vianet Group, Inc. and changed its name to VNET Group, Inc. in October 2021. VNET Group, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.