Austin Russell, chairman and chief executive officer of Luminar Technologies.in November, has big ambitions, but as Russell pointed out during its most recent earnings call, it doesn't need huge market share to make money.
Russell sees Luminar growing its forward-looking order book, which stood at $3.4 billion at the end of 2022, by at least another $1 billion in 2023. But most of that revenue is years away, and the company still has a long way to go before it starts reporting profits. Wall Street thinks Luminar has the cash to stick around until then, and it likes the look of the lidar maker's pipeline: Analysts expect Luminar to deliver $84.5 million in revenue this year, growing to $268.4 million in 2024, according to Refinitiv.Ouster is arguably Luminar's closest rival, but it has a somewhat different focus – and a much smaller market cap, at around $250 million.
But Pacala agrees that the market for automotive lidar is about to grow significantly. He said earlier this month that Ouster is about to begin shipping samples of a new low-cost solid-state lidar sensor called DF to automakers. A more advanced version – incorporating a new custom chip – is set to follow next year.