By Sam Boughedda
Shares of Luminar Technologies (NASDAQ:LAZR) were downgraded to Market Perform, with the price target trimmed to $10 per share at Northland Capital Markets on Thursday.
An analyst explained that the firm believes the adoption of its lidar is taking longer than expected, despite Luminar stating that it will be production ready by year-end.
"When we initiated coverage 2 years ago we expected LAZR to lead in production nomination. We also modeled LAZR to have roughly 31% auto lidar market share by 2025. Other Lidar companies have won nominations at GM, VW, BMW, and Mercedes. We believe that LAZR is still well positioned at a few OEMs mainly Chinese," wrote the analyst. "At the same time, our CY23 revenue estimate has decreased from $128M to $78M a street low. We cut our production volume estimate from 30K to 20K units as we believe LAZR's volume ramps will likely be smaller than originally forecast."
Meanwhile, he explained that US and Europe OEMs primarily use lidar to enhance safety and low-speed autonomy and that LAZR's product has a more extensive range than is required for these applications, resulting in less expensive alternatives winning production nominations.