Corporate Finance Explained | Competitive Moats: How Companies Build Long Term Advantage

In this episode of Corporate Finance Explained on FinPod, we break down competitive moats and the financial mechanics that allow a small subset of companies to sustain outsized profitability for decades, while most competitors see margins eroded.

A moat is a structural advantage that interrupts the normal economics of competition, where excess returns attract entrants and pricing power erodes over time. When a moat exists, it shows up directly in the numbers: durable pricing power, persistent margin resilience, and consistently high ROIC (return on invested capital).

This episode moves past the shorthand use of “wide moat” and focuses on what actually creates defensibility and how to spot moat strength, or moat erosion, before it becomes obvious in the stock price or the income statement.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why profits are naturally competed away and what it means to disrupt that process
• The core moat types that create durable advantage: switching costs, network effects, and scale advantages
• Why Visa’s two-sided network effect compounds defensibility over time
• How Apple’s ecosystem creates switching cost friction that supports pricing power and customer lifetime value
• Why “scale” can be a moat, but also becomes a liability when the competitive terrain shifts
• What Blockbuster and Blackberry reveal about moat erosion, paradigm shifts, and the scale trap
• How finance teams quantify moats using ROIC durability, churn, and pricing power under stress
• Why moat strength changes valuation through lower risk in long-duration cash flows and terminal value assumptions
• How capital allocation decisions either deepen a moat or leave the business exposed to commoditization

This episode is designed for professionals who want a more analytical way to evaluate defensibility, whether you’re investing, building strategy, or supporting leadership decisions. The key question isn’t just what a company earns, it’s why it earns it, and whether that advantage is compounding or deteriorating.