Stock Gumshoe

I'm very dubious of an Apple connection at this point.... (It could happen however, I haven't dismissed the idea.)

However, this is important to point out, because this is the kind of reporting that gets Microvision in the mainstream investor's attention.... That kind of attention and investor excitement can drive prices of stocks up very significantly.

Stock Gumshoe -- Much more at the source.


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So what’s our solution? Thinkolator sez this is Microvision (MVIS).

Microvision makes a laser beam scanning/projection technology — and it has been around for years as a “tiny projector” company, the stock was there for the dot-com boom and peaked in 2000, but was also pitched pretty aggressively by newsletters starting a decade or so ago — I wrote about it here in 2007 when Christian DeHaemer teased it as a “tiny $5 microcap” that “dazzles cell phone titans” and would soon have its technology in the next hot phone (that was just a few months after the first iPhone was released), and it did sound awfully cool at the time.

And it still sounds cool now — you can see it described on their website here — but it has to be cool for the company to have survived at all, frankly. The stock has not been treated well in the ensuing decade — if you adjust for the reverse split they had to do about five years ago, it’s now down about 90% since 2007, and the annual revenue has gone from about $10 million in 2007 to $9 million over the last four quarters. The world of consumer electronics moves fast, and it doesn’t seem like Microvision has ever been able to jump on the right train at the right time.

Will MVIS get built into the next iPhone? That’s a leap and a half, in my book — if they knew they were on the verge of any kind of high-volume business, either as a component supplier or as a licensor of their patents and technology, I would assume that they would not have wanted to raise $10 million at a discounted share price… which is what they did just a couple weeks ago. It may be that Microvision’s technology will get built into the iPhone or some other smartphone in the next year or two, I have no idea, but I’m finding it hard to believe that it will be in this next iPhone that is released in a few weeks.

That doesn’t mean the company is junk, of course, just that I think you should go into your analysis with a somewhat more cynical expectation than might be conveyed by Brown’s language in the ad. They did get that one $6.7 million order from a Chinese smartphone maker back in March, as teased, and presumably that will up their revenue in the second half of the year by roughly that amount… though they’ll still be a long way from break-even, and in the world of smartphones $6.7 million could easily be a wild test, an R&D-type expense.