August 6, 2020

MKS Inc. (MKX)


MKS Inc. (MKX) is an interesting stock option if you are looking to diversify your holdings within the Canadian engineering sector.  MKS is unique in that they their main focus is software engineering, as opposed to the more common types of engineering such as city planning, transportation efficiency, and facility management.  MKS (MKX) describes itself as a, “Global leader for application lifecycle management solutions.”  This is a fairly complicated way of saying that MKS is hired to help companies maximize the efficiency of their software, networks, and other computer-related applications.


MKS Inc. (MKS) lists five key components that have allowed them to rise to the top of the industry.  They are:


  1. Maintain our key differentiating advantage of one unified software engineering platform to build market leading solutions.
  2. Offer industry-leading capabilities in the key disciplines of software engineering, throughout the entire lifecycle.
  3. Focus on the most challenging development organizations, with diversity of platforms, applications, processes and geography, and those with the most burning software complexity challenges.
  4. Lean on our strong, domain knowledgeable consulting strength to maximize deployment, and therefore, value to our customers.
  5. Integrate with the key related software engineering tools.


MKS credits their success to the fact they are changing the way software is used in many workplaces.  They claim that before their main product (MKS Integrity) hit the market, most companies looked at software as, “Many disparate tools, loosely coupled together, in an attempt to provide a solution… Software ‘tool’ vendors embarked upon a strategy of acquiring additional point tools and attempting to string them all together to provide a ‘suite’ that addressed the software development lifecycle.”  MKS Inc. (MKX) changed that whole dynamic with their new approach.  Their goal is to build complete systems that are fully integrated and designed to work together instead of a bunch of separate parts that can be mashed together in order to make a working compromise.  The company purports that this efficient new approach can be broadly applied to a wide variety of concepts and businesses.  Considering how quickly the modern workplace is evolving technologically, I can see the benefits of this approach.  MKS Inc. (MKX) has successfully applied their software applications in the fields of automotive, medical, defense and aerospace.


I hesitate to make a recommendation on MKS one way or another simply because I know so little about the software field.  I am not sure I fully understand the complete scope of the services and products that they MKS produces.  From a purely financial statistics perspective the company appears to be in solid shape.  They have very little debt, a nice 4.13% dividend yield that includes solid growth numbers in the recent past, and moderates sales growth.  With the huge (and growing) demand for software efficiency in so many different industries MKS Inc. (MKX) could definitely be a solid play for those who can properly evaluate technological solutions in general.



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