Technology stocks offer investors the promise of growth in ways that few other sectors can. After all, tech is synonymous with innovation that spawns new products, services, and features.

The Morningstar US Technology Index has returned 60.30%, while the Morningstar US Market Index has returned 43.40% during the trailing one-year period through Oct. 28, 2024.

The tech stocks that Morningstar covers look nearly 9% overvalued as a group, but there are still opportunities to be found in the sector.\

10 best tech stocks to buy now

The stocks of these technology companies with Morningstar Economic Moat Ratings are the most undervalued according to our fair value estimates as of Oct. 28, 2024.

Here’s a little more about each of the best technology stocks to buy, including commentary from the Morningstar analyst who covers the stock. All data is as of Oct. 28, 2024.

STMicroelectronics

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.55
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Industry: Semiconductors

Semiconductor company STMicroelectronics is the cheapest stock on our list of best tech stocks to buy. The chipmaker is trading 45% below our fair value estimate of $52 per share.

STMicroelectronics is one of Europe’s largest chipmakers and holds one of the broadest product portfolios in the industry. The company has made structural improvements to its product mix and gross margin profile, which has allowed it to carve out a narrow economic moat. We think ST has some promising growth opportunities on the horizon in microcontrollers and automotive products, including silicon carbide-based semiconductors.

ST didn’t always have the best track record, regularly failing to earn robust profitability a decade ago due to investments in money-losing digital chip businesses and share loss in other chip products, among other stumbling blocks. It has turned around nicely as it exited these businesses and reduced its investments in various digital chips. Nonetheless, it is still in some highly competitive segments of the chip industry, such as commodity-like discrete chips that carry lower margins than analog chips and microcontrollers from US-based peers. We anticipate strong competition from Chinese firms in these areas in the years ahead but think ST’s reliability will still give it a leg up on these upstarts.

Still, ST’s leading technologies and strong position in the automotive market are reasons to be optimistic about the future, with especially promising opportunities in silicon carbide-based power products. The automotive industry is focused on safer, greener, smarter cars, which is leading to increased electronic content per vehicle. Broad-based chipmakers like ST stand to profit from greater demand for advanced infotainment systems, battery management solutions, and sensors associated with new safety features like blind-spot detection. Broad-based microcontroller sales also appear to be a nice growth avenue.

We anticipate decent growth and profitability improvement out of ST. However, we see wider moats and even more attractive product mixes and margin profiles across several pure-play US-based analog chipmakers we cover.

Brian Colello, Morningstar Strategist

Sensata Technologies

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.56
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Industry: Scientific & Technical Instruments

Trading 44% below our fair value estimate, narrow-moat Sensata Technologies continues to make our list of tech stocks to buy. We think Sensata stock is worth $64 per share.

We think Sensata Technologies is a differentiated supplier of sensors and electrical protection, predominantly for the automotive market. The firm has oriented itself to benefit from secular trends toward electrification, efficiency, and connectivity. Despite the cyclical nature of the automotive and heavy vehicle markets, electric vehicles and stricter emissions regulations provide Sensata the opportunity to sell into new sockets, which has allowed the firm to outpace underlying vehicle production growth by about 4% historically. We think such outperformance is achievable over the next 10 years, given our expectations for a fleet mix shift toward EVs and Sensata’s growing addressable content in higher-voltage vehicles.

In our view, Sensata’s ability to grow its dollar content in vehicles demonstrates intangible assets in sensor design, as it works closely with OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to build its products into new sockets. We also think the mission-critical nature of the systems into which Sensata sells gives rise to switching costs at customers, leading to an average relationship length of roughly three decades with its top 10 customers. As a result of switching costs and intangible assets, we believe Sensata benefits from a narrow economic moat and will earn excess returns on invested capital for the next 10 years.

Over the next decade, we expect Sensata to focus on organic growth in electric vehicles and increasingly electrified industrial applications. The firm has historically been an active acquirer but is focusing on organic investment, reduced leverage, and increased shareholder returns in the medium term, of which we approve. The firm’s ability to grow content in electric vehicles and outperform underlying global automotive production are the primary drivers of our investment thesis.

William Kerwin, Morningstar Analyst

Endava

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.59
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Industry: Software—Infrastructure

Software infrastructure company Endava is trading 41% below our fair value estimate. We think this narrow-moat company is worth $42 per share.

Endava, based in the UK, is an IT services company focused on providing digital transformation and engineering services. It generates revenue mainly by charging clients on a time and materials basis for services such as consulting/advice, customized software development and integration, and quality assurance and testing. Endava is highly exposed to the financial-services sector, with nearly half of its revenue generated from the sector. Within financial services, Endava is known for its expertise in payments and private equity.

Like many of its peers, Endava’s core strategy is to land and expand, which means securing big clients and growing revenue in those relationships by increasingly providing these clients more services. Endava’s 10-largest clients account for around a third of group revenue, with the largest, Mastercard, contributing around 10%. Mastercard has been a client for over 20 years.

Endava concentrates on the financial services and technology, media, and telecom industries. The company aims to diversify its industry exposure by securing new clients from new verticals. In particular, Endava is targeting clients in retail and healthcare, given its current expertise is most transferrable to these areas.

Similarly, the company is geographically concentrated, with around 40% of revenue generated in the UK and around 20% generated in continental Europe. To diversify, Endava is primarily growing its business in North America.

Endava’s delivery model is based on agile project management from employees in nearshore locations, which it plans to expand. To best serve its clients' unique digital transformation goals, the flexibility from the iterative nature of agile project management is effective. Furthermore, the nonstandardized nature of these projects requires constant dialogue and interaction between Endava and its clients, which means having delivery teams with similar time zones to its clients (nearshoring) is best to deliver the project successfully in a timely manner.

Endava is striving to achieve a maintainable organic revenue growth rate of around 20% with a relatively stable adjusted-profit-before-tax margin of 20%.

Rob Hales, Morningstar Senior Analyst

Infineon Technologies

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.62
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Industry: Semiconductors

Trading 38% below our fair value estimate of $54 per share, German company Infineon Technologies is the second undervalued semiconductor manufacturer to make our list of best tech stocks to buy. The firm has built a narrow moat in the semiconductor space.

Infineon is a leading broad-based European chipmaker, with significant exposure to secular growth drivers in the industrial and automotive chip sectors. Infineon should emerge as a leading supplier for electric vehicles and active safety systems used in cars, with increasing exposure to car “infotainment” systems. However, like most chipmakers, Infineon’s business remains highly cyclical as demand rises and falls with the health of its various end markets.

Looking at the automotive chip market, electric vehicles and cars with advanced powertrain technology and safety systems require a variety of sensors and power voltage chips supplied by firms like Infineon. Silicon-carbide, or SiC-based semis, used to handle higher voltages and improve the range and efficiency of EVs, are a particularly attractive opportunity for Infineon, but also for its rivals. Infineon’s exposure to power semis also allows it to benefit from trends in the electronics industry toward power conservation, not only in more efficient devices like industrial drives, but also in green energy solutions like solar panels. Infineon is also a leader in chip card and security products, such as chips for chip-and-pin credit cards. Finally, we think limiting exposure to challenging markets is just as important as increasing exposure to promising markets, and Infineon did a good job of eliminating unattractive business segments in prior years.

Nonetheless, Infineon’s product lines still face formidable competition. Many other large semiconductor firms also focus on power semiconductors and have similar products. Further, Infineon focuses on discrete power products rather than analog power management integrated circuits. While the former products are valuable to customers, the latter of which we view as more complex products that allow leading analog firms (such as several wide-moat names we cover) to enjoy stronger pricing power and relatively higher returns on invested capital. Infineon also has hefty manufacturing capacity for its products, which may lead to a higher fixed-cost structure and may cause significant margin compression when supply far exceeds demand.

Brian Colello, Morningstar Strategist

Nice

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.65
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Industry: Software—Application

Software application company Nice earns a narrow economic moat rating. This undervalued tech stock is trading at a 35% discount to our fair value estimate of $275 per share.

Nice provides cloud and on-premises software solutions that primarily serve the customer engagement market as well as the financial crime and compliance, or FC&C, market. The majority of revenue is generated in the US, but international expansion has become a bigger priority.

The customer engagement segment contributes around 80% of company revenue, which includes Nice’s nascent public safety business. CXone, Nice’s flagship customer engagement product, is a cloud-native contact center as a service, or CCaaS, platform that delivers a seamless solution combining contact center software and workforce engagement management. CXone is an industry-leading product that will become increasingly critical for enabling omnichannel interactions amid a move to digital-first customer engagement. With only 15% to 20% of contact center agents in the cloud, including minimal from the enterprise market, the residual opportunity is significant. Consequently, we expect strong midterm growth as customers transition to the cloud.

The company earns about 20% of revenue from its FC&C business, which represents cloud-based risk management, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, and compliance solutions. We expect that the increasing cost of compliance, the digitalization of financial-services firms, the disruption of digital assets, and the explosion of data will accelerate the cloudification of the financial-services industry. Nice now has cloud-based solutions to serve organizations of all sizes, including X-Sight for the enterprise market and Xceed for the small and medium-size market.

For its 2022-26 strategic cycle, Nice is targeting double-digit total revenue growth, more than 80% of total revenue from cloud products, and a non-GAAP operating margin above 30%.

Rob Hales, Morningstar Senior Analyst

Sony

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.73
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Industry: Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics giant Sony stays on our list of best tech stocks to buy this month. Sony stock is trading 27% below our fair value estimate of $24.40 per share.

As technologies and consumer preferences change rapidly, it is generally difficult for consumer electronics companies to build an economic moat. The replacement cycle for digital appliances is usually four to six years, but as most products are commoditized, it is difficult for manufacturers to build an ecosystem that prevents customers from switching to other brands. As a result, Sony’s profitability on electronics had been unstable in the past, while its music, movies, and financial-services businesses have generated solid results.

Over the past decade, Sony has transformed its business model to enable more solid and stable growth by reducing the volatility of the consumer electronics business and by aggressively investing in content for its entertainment businesses such as music, movies, and games.

In the consumer electronics business, profits are generated from digital cameras and audio equipment, where Sony has strengths, while the TV business is thoroughly focused on avoiding losses by focusing on premium products and strictly managing inventories.

In the music and movie businesses, Sony has been able to seize growth opportunities such as the expansion of the streaming market, by expanding its content and exploring new artists.

The image sensor business has the largest global market share. The majority of sales come from the mobile market, which is benefiting from the strong demand for improved image quality in smartphone cameras. However, unlike the entertainment businesses, image sensors require high capital investment and research and development, and with such high fixed costs, we believe the profitability of the business is not high enough.

PlayStation is Sony’s largest revenue-generating business. While user migration from PS4 to PS5 is progressing well, rising game development costs and competition from other platforms such as Steam are becoming a concern for the business.

Kazunori Ito, Morningstar Director

UiPath

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.76
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Very High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Industry: Software—Infrastructure

UiPath has built a narrow moat in the software infrastructure industry. UiPath stock is 24% undervalued relative to our $16.50 fair value estimate.

UiPath offers end-to-end cross-application process automation software. It deploys a combination of automation technologies including robotic process automation, application programming interface, artificial intelligence, and low-code/no-code functionality to automate complex, multistep processes. UiPath’s core RPA technology boasts leading market share by revenue and has garnered accolades from industry analysts for superior product functionality and strategy.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform uncovers automation opportunities in customer’s workflows via sophisticated tools including process, task, and communication mining. Once a process is identified as ripe for automation, software developers and business users (known as citizen developers) establish rules, triggers, and processes that run either on command or continuously without human intervention. These processes can include automation to open and log into software, extract data from documents, move folders, fill in forms, update information fields and databases, and read and generate written communication. Lastly, the platform supports analytics, governance, and testing of automated processes at scale.

We expect UiPath to continue to execute a successful land-and-expand strategy as customers uncover further automation opportunities and adopt a broader set of platform functionality. UiPath’s offering delivers meaningful cost savings, efficiency, and risk-management benefits to customers looking to automate repetitive processes traditionally executed manually by humans. Automating such tasks allows customers to reduce resource intensity, redirect resources to higher-value tasks, and support business growth. Examples of repetitive tasks primed for automation include insurance claims processing, invoice and order processing, employee recruitment and onboarding, loan applications, and customer service and support, such as password resets or scheduling appointments. In addition, advancements in AI are supporting automation of more complex and cognitive tasks such as those with greater variability and unstructured data.

Emma Williams, Morningstar Analyst

Adobe

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.76
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Industry: Software—Infrastructure

Trading 24% below our fair value estimate, Adobe is an undervalued tech stock in the software infrastructure industry. We think this wide-moat company is worth $635 per share.

Adobe has come to dominate in content creation software with its iconic Photoshop and Illustrator solutions, both now part of the broader Creative Cloud. The company has added new products and features to the suite through organic development and bolt-on acquisitions to drive the most comprehensive portfolio of tools used in print, digital, and video content creation. The December 2021 launch of Adobe Express helps further broaden the company’s funnel, as it incorporates popular features of the full Creative Cloud but comes in lower cost and free versions. The 2023 introduction of Firefly marks an important artificial intelligence solution that should also attract new users. We think Adobe is properly focusing on bringing new users under its umbrella and believe that converting these users will become more important over time.

CEO Shantanu Narayen provided Adobe with another growth leg in 2009 with the acquisition of Omniture, a leading web analytics solution that serves as the foundation of the digital experience segment that Adobe has used as a platform to layer in a variety of other marketing and advertising solutions. Adobe benefits from the natural cross-selling opportunity from Creative Cloud to the business and operational aspects of marketing and advertising. On the heels of the Magento, Marketo, and Workfront acquisitions, we expect Adobe to continue to focus its M&A efforts on the digital experience segment and other emerging areas.

The Document Cloud is driven by one of Adobe’s first products, Acrobat, and the ubiquitous PDF file format created by the company; it is now a $2.8 billion business. The rise of smartphones and tablets, coupled with bring-your-own-device and a mobile workforce, has made a file format that is usable on any screen more relevant than ever.

Adobe believes it is attacking an addressable market well in excess of $200 billion. The company is introducing and leveraging features across its various cloud offerings (like Sensei artificial intelligence) to drive a more cohesive experience, win new clients, upsell users to higher-price-point solutions, and cross-sell digital media offerings.

Dan Romanoff, Morningstar Senior Analyst

ASML Holding

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.76
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Industry: Semiconductor Equipment & Materials

ASML Holding is the last of three wide-moat companies to make our list of best tech stocks to buy. Shares of this semiconductor equipment and materials firm are trading 24% below our fair value estimate of $935.

We believe ASML will remain the top lithography equipment provider in semiconductor foundries for at least the next two decades. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Intel, and Samsung’s fabs were redesigned one decade ago to make them suitable for extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV, a costly and long endeavor, so it is quite unlikely ASML will be displaced from its place in the foundry. In addition, no competitor has yet matched ASML’s technological leadership and the company’s competitive advantage will likely keep expanding as it grows its already-high EUR 4 billion research and development budget.

ASML is an assembler, sourcing the highest-quality parts from suppliers to build its lithography machines. This allows the firm to maintain cost flexibility in the cyclical semiconductor industry, a positive for gross margins. ASML has a solid supply chain management strategy as some of its parts are single-sourced and the firm has never had any major disruptions.

Despite the high price of ASML’s machines, the company provides value to customers by bringing down the cost per wafer through increased productivity. This focus is crucial, as customers need to see a return on investment when they spend EUR 200 million to EUR 300 million on a single lithography machine. ASML’s machines are the bottleneck of the fab, so if productivity stagnates customers could look for workarounds to reduce their dependency on lithography.

ASML’s machines can last more than 30 years. The firm sells the machines at an attractive gross margin, but then keeps generating recurring service revenue for many decades. ASML EUV machines are more complex than previous deep ultraviolet, or DUV, ones, which means a higher potential for service revenue during its lifetime. Ninety percent of ASML’s lithography equipment that has been sold is still functioning and generating service revenue. Management expects to increase service margins in the next decade as it focuses more on this segment and launches more complex machines. Software and hardware upgrades are also a high margin business, although these can be more cyclical given the foundry needs to stop production to implement them.

Javier Correonero, Morningstar Analyst

Paycom

  • Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.76
  • Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Very High
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Industry: Software―Application

Narrow-moat Paycom rounds out our list of best tech stocks to buy. Shares of this software application firm are trading at a 24% discount to our $220 fair value estimate.

Paycom’s unified platform appeals to midsize and enterprise clients that prefer an all-in-one payroll and human capital management solution. The company’s platform is supported by a single database, which provides a single source of truth and allows efficient software development and maintenance. Unlike competitors, Paycom discourages data integrations to third-party providers but instead incentivizes clients to contain their HCM solutions within its unified platform by offering add-on modules, including time and attendance and benefits administration. In practice, new clients may consolidate their payroll and HCM solutions from multiple providers to an all-in-one solution by Paycom. The company is focused on driving greater automation and employee self-service, supported by complementary analytics tools for clients and the rollout of its Beti self-service payroll module.

We expect Paycom will continue to take share of the growing payroll and HCM industry through industry consolidation and capitalizing on the shortfalls of competitors. The company has reported impressive growth to date, reflecting an ability to win clients and demonstrating how the cost and efficiency benefits of streamlining payroll and HCM solutions to a single platform can overcome inherent client switching costs.

We anticipate Paycom will expand average revenue per client due to a gradual shift upmarket and from taking greater share of wallet through upselling existing and new modules. Paycom’s target market has shifted upward over several years, with the company formally lifting the upper bound to over 10,000 employees in 2023 from 2,000 in 2013. While we expect Paycom’s average client size to increase, we expect its offering to be less appealing to mega enterprises that typically prefer to integrate best-of-breed solutions, in our view limiting the upmarket upside for Paycom.

Emma Williams, Morningstar Analyst

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