Will we ever get to hear a revenue projection before those revenues hit the books?
posted on
Nov 15, 2022 09:55AM
This is from 1 year ago, but I believe it's important to feed new potential investors some of the more critical information. There is so much good information in this excerpt.
Suresh:
"Depending on how our business grows, I wouldn’t say “never” discuss the names of customers. Nevertheless it is not customary for public companies to give long term forecasts so we will not be doing that. We have identified and quantified systematically what the revenue trajectory would be. We have disclosed that for SPX because its their revenue, it’s the JVs revenue. But on the Poet side as well, we’re putting the business plan associated with [what] Poet’s revenue is going to be in the markets that Poet would serve independent of the market that the Super Photonics JV would serve. Its really critical that we kind of level-set a bit on what the JV is.. the purpose for establishing it. First, people don’t engage until you have a certain amount of scale, so the JV gives us a ticket to play, effectively. So it allows us to get in the doors of people because we’ve got the capacity to be ablr to service them. But I think more importantly it’s teaming up with a company that has the reputation of this manufacturing scale which we did with Sanan IC. We set it up in China, because, especially for the low end, 100G 200G, and even in the initial phases of 400G, the market’s all in China. That’s where, predominantly, the customers are. The high-end customers, so 400 FR4, 800, co-packaged optics. They’re more global. But in the low end it’s primarily China. Establishing that JV to access that market was really important for us. So how does the revenue situation play out? So SPX gets a revenue and obviously Poet benefits immensely from that. First of all as they ramp volume, our technology and market acceptance is validated and the ability to scale manufacturing is demonstrated. That opens the door across the board, for other products as well. Poet plans to sell 400G, 800G, co-packaged optics and other remote lasing sources that are not really part of the JV so that forms Poets revenue stream… as well as some non-recurring expenses that we can garner as consequence of working with customers. But the value of Super Photonics is cash. It generates cash from operations that would be dividends out to the company. But even more importantly, valuations in China are immense. 10 to 20X revenue. So as SPX starts generating revenue, the value of SPX grows immensely and Poet would own half the JV. So its really important to note that our share of the JV and the value of that increases dramatically as SPX starts hitting its revenue targets. So we think that there is going to be a time when SPX will go public on the STAR exchange in China [Shanghai] at very good valuations, and that just directly translates to benefit to Poet. We’ve already been approached by folks who see the potential of that, the potential IPO I would say, to buy out some of our shares and equity shares in the company. SPX is very strategic for a number of reasons. One is proliferating our technology and ensuring that there’s market acceptance for it. It is access to the China market which otherwise we would not have been able to access. Its providing a non-dilutive value to the company because of the very nature of the valuation structures in China. And our ability to potentially to liquidate some of our equity stake to promote the kind of growth that we want to do on the Poet side. I know it’s a complex story, but strategically it makes a lot of sense for us. We are really happy that we are at the point we are at with the JV, and the revenue trajectory associated with that as well as the trajectory that we can engender on the Poet side."