$IONQ (Ionq) is a former spac that despaced in October 2021 at a valuation of $1.4B. The spac had a sizable PIPE of 350M consisting of the following investors: Fidelity Management & Research Company, Silver Lake, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates), MSD Partners, Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Corporation.
About IonQ
Ionq is a quantum computing hardware and software company that was founded by two professors from UMD and Duke. IonQ seems to have an impressive background with more than 200+ publications, 19+ patents and over $165 million in grants from the government. Most notably, IonQ seems to be one of the leaders in the quantum computing space, and already has partnerships with leading cloud providers AWS & Microsoft Azure for integrating their hardware with the cloud provider’s offerings.
Projections
IonQ does not project to be profitable until 2025 and they do not expect to have serious revenue until 2024 (when their hardware will be usable for machine learning applications by cloud providers).
News & Catalysts
IonQ reported excellent earnings on August 15, 2022 after market close. They announced that their hardware has achieved 23 algorithmic qubits, making their Aria quantum computer the most powerful known quantum computer in the world. This is on track with their projections of 25 algorithmic qubits by the end of 2022. They beat on revenue and slightly missed on EPS but their cash position is still very healthy and they should have enough cash to continue operations for the next few years.
Notable achievements:
Announced a paid contract with Airbus
Announced a paid contract with Dow
Partnership with GE Research
IonQ’s Aria platform will be available via Microsoft Azure Quantum
Research contract with UMD to build a quantum router
Finalized a subcontract with Zapata computing to collaborate on a multi-million dollar DARPA project
Sorry for the short DD. Here’s an excellent and thorough one on r/spacs (Please check it out!):
!si metrics look mixed. Given that earnings were good and the company is on track with their goals, perhaps shorts may cover somewhat. However, with CTB at 8.9% it’s not too difficult for them to hold their position.
Shorts Average Price, Utilization, P/L, and ConqDTC look good though.
Thanks @Kevin ! FWIW, $IONQ has a tendency to run when the market is frothy and when there is peak euphoria. I think with major uncertainties out of the way (earnings and CPI) we can expect this ticker to have lots of bullish price action from the post-earnings momentum. I’m not endorsing this as a long-term swing play even though it looks promising. At the end of the day, this is an extremely high-risk investment. Quantum computing is one of the most speculative industries to be in and there is a very real chance that this company goes to $0 before it can achieve widespread commercial adoption.
I think there is a chance that when throwing out the deSPAC trash of 2020 and 2021 the market might have missed a few potential gems (ASTS, OPEN, ORGN, IONQ, and a few of the battery companies spring to mind) that will be worth looking into as long term, high risk, high reward plays.
Yeah seems like the drop was mostly SPY correlated. They have a pretty low burn rate and have enough cash to sustain operations for a few years and just had excellent earnings. I don’t see any bearish news in the last few days that could’ve caused the drop.
Orders got filled at .35 for the 10/21 7.5c today. Didn’t think they would ever get triggered. Not seeing any bad news so it seems like the sp is just falling with the rest of the market.
