Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Commentary/Opinion- What the heck is going on with the Luna Innovations share price?



Since hitting a 52 week stock price high, on January 26th, 2017 of $2.27, Luna Innovations stock price has continued to fall, and this morning hit an intra-day low (to this point) of $1.31. Investor interest on the various stock message boards has been tepid at best, so I wanted to share some information relating to Luna that hasn't been widely circulated. 

According to US Spending.gov, Luna in the calendar year 2017 has obtained 62 contracts or grants with the US Government,  (under the names Luna innovations, Advanced Photonix and Picometrix) totaling $8,349,926 in prime contract awards, and another $1,035,698 in sub-contract awards. These awards can be found on this link:

 https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?sub=y&ST=C,G,L,O&FY=2017&A=0&SS=USA&k=luna%20innovations

I don't know about you, but I thought this was a very significant number of awards to a small tech company in a single year, that still has five and a half months left.

However, strangely you won't find a mention about these awards on the Luna webpage or in press releases, Luna CEO, My Chung's comments on the last investor conference call only made passing reference to this topic:


"Turning briefly to our technology development division where we mainly do government research. We continue to grow at a double-digit rate, with year-over-year growth of 15% for the first quarter. This group has done a phenomenal job over the past couple of years and improving their win rates both for new contracts and in demonstrating positive results in their phase one program, resulting in the government awarding us larger phase two follow-on contracts.
As these programs typically run over a period of several months, we expect to see continued revenue growth around this level for next quarter as well." 
Of course, the bulk of Luna's income is derived from the private sales of their High Speed Optical Receivers (HSOR), sales of the Luna ODiSi system, and from Terahertz sales. I wanted readers and the investing public, to be aware of these "hidden sales". I remain "bullish" on Luna and on terahertz. Of course, this is not investment advice and as always perform your own due diligence. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Randy, thanks for your insights ! I share your optimism with Luna but I am concerned with the CEO's seemingly laze-fair attitude toward profitability which he has displayed quarter after quarter for several years now. With all of the leading edge research and development that they are involved with one might think that some day they will hit a home run. Let's hope that is sooner rather than later......some of us have been waiting far too long at this juncture...............