There is a plausible scenario in which Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX) reaches its ambitious goal of $100 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by year-end.
The big call #
SpaceX reiterated its goal of reaching $100 billion in ARR by year-end, a target that may not be as insane as it appeared on the company's earnings call transcript last week.
"As a baseline, 2Q's [ARR] run-rate was just $31 billion, meaning management is aiming to more than triple that in just six months. We see this target as likely very achievable, driven mainly by neocloud and Cursor contribution," Deutsche Bank analyst and SpaceX bull Edison Yu said in a note on Monday.
"Neocloud carrying the largest load In 2Q, neocloud revenue was $1.6b billion, all coming from Anthropic (ANTH.PVT); this deal alone should ramp up to $3.75 billion in 3Q in quarterly revenue," Yu explained. "In addition, the Google (GOOG, GOOGL) agreement is set to ramp up next month and hit full $920m/month rate beginning in Oct. Then most recently, SpaceX signed a $6.7bn over six month deal which we suspect could possibly be with the US government. And lastly, we expect one more large neocloud deal to get potentially signed before year-end considering industry compute supply/demand dynamics. Putting it all together, this could generate $45- 50bn of ARR exiting December." Here's how Yu estimates this number will be reached:
Keep in mind #
It has been an action-packed two weeks for SpaceX investors.
A total of 911.5 million shares of SpaceX held by employees and early investors became eligible to trade last Thursday, two days after the company's first earnings report as a public company. That equated to about 43% more than the 638.9 million shares issued at IPO.
Investors shrugged it all off, with the stock up 16% late last week. Shares have rallied from an intraday low of $104.83 on Aug. 3 up to a close of $133.11 on Aug. 7.
On Monday, the stock climbed past its $135 initial public offering price for the first time in about a month. But the shares are still off the record high of $225 hit around the time of the June IPO.
Lost somewhat in the focus on the lockup expiry have been the puts and takes to SpaceX's second quarter and how the performance may look similar in the third quarter.
Total capital expenditures for SpaceX in the second quarter were $18.4 billion, well above analyst estimates of around $6 billion. Commentary by executives indicated that third and fourth quarter capex could each remain at similar levels, implying full-year capex of about $65 billion. Wall Street was modeling for $50 billion in capital expenditures this year.