[루미나]Luminar says its Wall Street debut will outperform Velodyne’s. Here’s why

In the wake of Velodyne Lidar Inc.'s dramatic drop last week in its Wall Street debut, leaders of rival Luminar Technologies Inc. told potential investors on Tuesday that the companies shouldn't be lumped together.

 

"The public markets are in the early stages of understanding lidar and the opportunity for autonomous vehicles in general," said Tom Fennimore, who joined the Palo Alto startup as chief financial officer in July after being a chief automotive investment banker at Jefferies Group LLC and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

 

"Velodyne is a really good company but at the end of the day they are focused on a very different segment of the lidar market than we are," he said.

 

Like San Jose-based Velodyne (NASDAQ:VLDR), Luminar is going public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) — Beverly Hills-based Gores Metropoulos (NASDAQ:GMHI) — and plans to take over its stock listing.

 

But even after factoring in last week's 32% drop, Velodyne's stock price is trading at about 50% above where its merger partner — Graf Industrial Corp. — was when their deal was announced in June. Share's of Luminar's SPAC partner soared by about 28% after they announced their deal in August but have given all of that up since.

Both Velodyne and Luminar have important automotive backers, with Ford and Volvo respectively.

 

Velodyne, however, has shifted much of its focus away from providing sensors for fully autonomous vehicles and moved on to providing eyes for driver-assist safety features, drones, robots and other applications. It figures that about half of its revenue in the immediate future will come from non-automotive uses.

 

Luminar has stuck with the auto market, announcing at Tuesday's streamed presentations that it had shipped its first lidar units, called Iris, to Volvo as it works towards adding them to their vehicles in 2022.

"All of the day-to-day (stock market values) for us is totally noise," Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell told investors. "We remain, literally and figuratively, laser-focused on the deliverable of Iris in 2022 into series production."

 

Luminar projects it won't be profitable on an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization basis (EBITDA) — until its 2024 fiscal year. Velodyne projects a profit on that same basis by 2022.

 

Luminar CFO Fennimore said on Tuesday that one of the reasons the company decided to go public via a SPAC instead of a traditional IPO was the opportunity it gave to educate investors about what it does.

"The markets had very high expectations about the near-term opportunities of autonomous vehicles a few years ago," he said. "That has been recalibrated and people realize now that it will probably tale a lot longer to realize, particularly with regard to robotaxis. The fact that Volvo plans to put us on their vehicles in 2022 may be a surprise to some investors."

 

CEO Russell said he believes that focusing on the commercial trucking and consumer vehicle markets will prove to be the right decision.

"Those markets are worth about $3 trillion a year in sales," he said. "We will go after the trillion dollar industry and do some work in other industries to drive some diversification. But we're all in with the mentality of go big or go home."