Who's buying more shares?
I increased my share count by 50% last week. My first purchase of MVIS stock in years.
When the entire auto industry went through their failure to launch moment (wasn't there a movie by that title?) our stock tanked because we were all-in on automotive lidar. The average 7 year old's lemonade stand puts up better quarterly revenue numbers than this cash consuming company that's given us nothing but hope for 3 decades.
But being the long-time fool that I've been (so don't take this as financial advice) I have decided to buy more shares, a lot more. I like what I'm seeing, I think the industrial opportunity is bigger than we may think -- maybe bigger than the company projects, in fact. Just those forklift accident numbers, alone, cost industry billions, not to mention the pain and suffering of those injured. We have the products and pricing strategy to address that. Not to mention all the other industrial operations, mining, etc. that are moving into automated operations in an exponentially increasing basis. They all need sensors, and lidar is a great fit for many of these.
Then there are the military applications, security, nighttime and poor visibility in which vision just doesn't cut it. When I look at our current valuation, a market cap around $200M, I conclude that the investor community still views MVIS as a dog that has always been a dog and that will always be a dog. But I believe the beginnings of proof that we are in-fact a soon to be fast growing real company with a lot of prospects in many sectors, with a management team who knows how to actually run such a company.
Time will tell if we have potential to be a $10 billion market cap company, but if we hit $1B, that's a 5X return. I can take that, although I think we do have much more beyond that once we prove that we can sell something that has some zeros before the decimal point.
I don't think our last CEO was duplicitous or even did a bad job managing the company. He just made one BIG mistake. He trusted the auto industry to move at tech industry speed and then bet the company on it. But, remember, he wasn't alone. Witness all the carcasses containing valuable tech that we've acquired in the past couple of years.
We now have a CEO who is just kicking butt in every direction -- product acquisitions, entry into new very promising markets, a pricing strategy that can compete with China (without the China spying and sabotage factor). And our guy is out there! Constant interviews, presentations. I love it. So I bought.
I am curious. Are other long-time or non-long term previous investors that have been burned by this company buying again? What are you all thinking?