The company isn’t reposing its standing with large corporations. In an unusual break with strategy, it launched a subscription-based version of its data gathering and analytics technologies, targeted at startups in July. Within a month, the company reported signing up a number of new clients in diverse industries such as healthcare, financial technology, robotics and software.
For the next quarter, the company expects a revenue of $385 million vs analysts’ forecasts of $376.4 million. In the long run, the company expects annual revenue growth of 30% or more till the end of 2025.
The Cons
The company was estimated to have only 149 distinct customers in both its segments. This is a critical weakness: in 2019, the company reported that its top 20 customers accounted for 67% of its revenue, with its top three accounting for 28%. In fact, a single commercial customer accounted for 12% of its revenue. Therefore, the loss of any of these major customers would be a huge blow to the company’s bottom line.
The company has also stated that it won’t work with “customers or governments whose positions or actions we consider inconsistent with our mission to support Western liberal democracy and its strategic allies.” This means that the total addressable market it can grow into is limited by design. In its addressable market, the company is dogged with controversy. Its product notably has been – and continues to be – used in the tracking of illegal immigrants into the U.S., invoking ire from one specific end of the political spectrum.
One example is the Covid-19 “Data Store” project by the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) – conceived to track the spread of the virus using patient data with the company’s Foundry platform. Both the government and the company faced protests from civil liberties and migrant advocacy organizations as well as select members of U.K.’s Labour Party. The contract, which began in March 2020, was quietly extended in December of that year – to even greater protests.
This is an issue: the greatest impediment to securing new clients isn’t another business entity. The threat is from the highly-charged political sphere.
Another critical issue with the company is that it hasn’t turned a profit yet. Over the past 15 years, the company has spent $2 billion in R&D simply in refining its products. Additionally, management compensation packages are a little high. CEO Alex Karp’s compensation – reported this month – includes options worth $797.9 million and another $296.4 million for stock awards. This is estimated to be a standard pattern of compensation for company executives for several years now.
While on the plus side, the company claims to be debt-free, the issue of non-profitability and the high executive compensation makes the company appear to be on somewhat shaky ground.
In Conclusion
In an interesting development, the company has recently acquired over $50 million in gold bars in anticipation of a “black swan event” – an unexpected event of potentially severe consequences. This is an interesting new addition to the company’s value since gold assets are considered “recession-proof”. Throughout Q2, the company also started taking stakes in startups using Palantir software, which helped boost sales results.
The company’s unique value proposition and strategies has not gone unnoticed – a total of 5.6 million PLTR shares (worth about $139 million) were added by Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest across all six of its actively managed exchange-traded funds on the 13th of August.
After going public in September last year, the company’s stock (PLTR) performance went to dizzying heights in Q1 2021 – like most stocks – but had cooled down considerably in Q2. Comparing the stock versus the benchmark Nasdaq-100 (NDX) and the powerhouse Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK) gives a pretty strong insight into the stock’s popularity.
