"Real billion dollar companies have trillion dollar market size; they are scalable and they leverage drivers of growth to go viral or global."
Over the last 20 years, I have been following this high-tech company that is now at the cusp of hyper growth in sales revenue and profitability. In the last year or so, all of the enabling technologies have come together to make mass production possible to meet global demand in a trillion dollar market at a reasonable cost.
The Next Trillion Dollar Idea is here… News Update December 14, 2023
Company: MicroVision [NASDAQ: MVIS]
Technology: Laser Beam Scanning [LBS] Display Engine, Interactive Display Engine, 3D Scanning, LIDAR 3-D Scanning*, Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things, and broad base IP Portfolio for technology licensing.
[*MicroVision offers a family of automotive Lidar sensors and solutions for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles, and non-automotive applications, including industrial, smart infrastructure, and robotics.]
What defines the trillion dollar Idea
- Trillion dollar size of the market for products and services.
- The ability to scale product or service and deliver stated ROA, ROI, performance, quality, reliability, and safety. [ROA: Return on Adoption]
- The ability to leverage drivers of growth, such as, capital, energy, cheap labor, technology, other people’s time, or other people’s money to take it viral or go global.
In Summary
Real billion dollar ideas need multi trillion dollar market size; they should be scalable, and able to leverage drivers of growth to go viral or global. Over 80 million new cars are sold every year and each one of them is a candidate for MicroVision’s Lidar and sensors for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles.
Leverage and command over these drivers of growth are constantly changing; as technologies become democratized and use of energy and cheap labor becomes common place. When this happens, the playing field is leveled again and new markets or a new set of drivers of growth or new leveraged advantages must be found.
Those who understand and learn how to use capital, energy, cheap labor, technology, other people's time, other people's money combined with the power of business systems that deliver great value are the ones who create wealth. Once they get such formula correct, huge wealth comes from SCALING that value delivery to the masses at a global scale.
Today the power of leverage is found in many ways. Financial strategies, diverse technologies, business models, outsourcing, communications, web 2.0, social media, advertising, real estate, transportation, to name a few...
To become a billionaire… develop a billion dollar idea… and help a billion people on this planet of over 7 billion humans.
Multi-billion Dollar Markets
In addition to PicoP projection display MicroVision is targeting four noteworthy tech arrivals of the last few years that are gaining momentum, and are expected to experience extremely rapid growth in the next few years.
I believe MicroVision has keystone technology for all of them:
We suggest reading rest of this article to bring you up-to-date as part of your due diligence…
MicroVision has accelerated revenues in the 3rd quarter of 2023
Here's the full Q3 earnings conference call transcript...
MicroVision (MVIS) CEO Sumit Sharma on Q3 2023 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
Sumit Sharma
Thank you, Drew, and welcome everyone to this review of our third quarter 2023 results. I'm excited to be presenting today, and will provide color on progress made on our 2023 objectives of securing multiple nominations for our LiDAR products. I will keep my update concise to allow for more time for questions today. I'm happy to report that we remain on course on our main 2023 objective of securing multiple designs wins with nominations from OEMs. We remain the only LiDAR company that offers multiple technology nodes, with highest resolutions, smallest form factor LiDAR with our MEMS-based long-range MAVIN, as well as small form factor short-range sequential flash-based MOVIA LiDAR product lines.
We continue developing our revenue streams from strategic and other channels, and I'm satisfied with the progress so far. The biggest opportunity for the company remains in strategic partnerships with automotive OEMs for our LiDAR products. Establishing a predictable level of direct sales from non-automotive customers is also very important for all LiDAR companies to be successful. I would like to start by updating you on our progress on multiple opportunities for LiDAR nominations, target launch timelines, and the magnitude of deals we're looking at.
Our teams remain engaged with multiple OEMs looking to identify their next LiDAR partner for expanded ADAS safety for their passenger vehicles and commercial trucking product lines to be nominated in 2023, and be ready for start of production as early as 2027. The combined lifetime volume of all the programs up for nomination in 2023 are for millions of units with their cumulative revenues of between $1.2 billion and $950 million over the life of production. We believe these first nominations would have a lifetime of up to seven years, with multiple passenger vehicles models added incrementally to their fleet. These are predominantly for vehicles with internal combustion engine power trains.
Based on these engagements, we remain confident in the timeline to sustainable revenues from strategic sales opportunities. In addition to the current nomination cycle that we work diligently to close, we are starting to see additional opportunities for 2024 nominations, with a new potential list of OEMs. These new opportunities would require limited modifications for additional customers that would be covered by NREs in potential future projects. This is an important step since this allows us to establish stable product lines that will address multiple OEMs with shared core developments costs, instead of individual projects for OEMs.
We remain very excited about where we are in the nomination process. And I've mentioned before, after a successful OEM design win, we expect two phases for each engagement. In the first phase, we expect to customize our core technology to the specifics for the OEMs needed under the development agreement while maintaining our investments in core engineering. In the second phase, we expect to supply parts as their ADAS tier 1 with our contract manufacturing partner under a master supply agreement with the OEM. As I mentioned before, the continued strength of our balance sheet and capability to fund operations until the start of production is a requirement in all possible nominations.
Management has articulated this to our investors and the broader market, as you may recall. I would like to repeat what I mentioned at our last earnings call. I believe we are well-positioned for this item, being a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ exchange, with no debt, control over expenses, and a clear understanding of how to grow proportionally to meet the needs of multiple potential customers. We are also confident in our long-term product outlook that will continue fueling customer engagements. In our product strategy, to focus on LiDAR products, with embedded perception software is the right strategy for the LiDAR product lines. We are seeing this in our current and new engagements.
With this strategy, we provide a stable hardware and software product to our potential customers with object-level interface possible at the lowest power and smallest form factor. Our embedded perception software will do the heavy lifting and enable our OEM customer software. This will potentially offer system cost reductions to our customers, and an opportunity to reduce other sensors like radar and camera modules. I also see us making progress in establishing realistic foundations and key target customers for our direct sales. Our objective is to build a sustainable business.
Unlike others in the market that are conducting direct sales at low single-digit gross margins, we are focusing on target customers in the industrial space that see value in the LiDAR product. Partnerships with low single-digit gross margins are not the right product strategy since expenses are not even covered. We see an opportunity for our industrial segment to focus on factory and warehouse automation, as well as fuel qualified safety sensors in the future. Our focus is building sustainable and profitable revenues, while controlling our burn rate and finding a path to sustainable business as soon as possible.
I want to conclude by thanking our global team for their hard work that has allowed us to be well-positioned for an incredible year ahead. We continue working hard to push across finish lines on our primary objective of securing long-term sustainable revenues.
I would like to now turn the call over to Anubhav to talk about our financials. Anubhav?
A very encouraging earnings conference call and some exciting news expected prior to the end of Q1, 2024.
The latest wave is the emergence of on-device artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of relying entirely on the cloud for AI insights, a new wave of specialized algorithms and chips is delivering deep insights wherever work is done. According to ABI Research, shipments of devices with edge AI capabilities will grow fifteen fold by 2023, to 1.2 billion units. The share of AI tasks that take place on edge devices instead of in the cloud will grow more than seven fold, from 6 percent in 2017 to 43 percent in 2023.
AI at the Edge is the next gold mine.
AI AT THE EDGE