6 Lidar Stocks For The Autonomous Vehicle Revolution

Auto technology stocks certainly have Wall Street’s attention this year. Young investors appear to see next-generation auto technology as a major long-term investment opportunity.

Autonomous vehicle technology is one of the biggest investment themes in the auto market these days, and Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh recently did a deep dive on Lidar tech stocks.

What Is Lidar? Lidar is shorthand for light detection and ranging, and it is a way for self-driving cars and other robots to use lasers to detect objects in the world around them and get fast, accurate measures of spatial locations based on how long it takes the laser beams to reflect back to the sensors.

Rakesh estimates the global Lidar market was worth about $1.5 billion in 2019, but will reach about $3.6 billion by 2025 — or roughly a 15% compound annual growth rate.

“The automotive segment is expected to grow significantly faster from <$200M in 2019 to ~$1.7B by 2025E, a ~59% CAGR, as Autos could account for ~50% of the LiDAR market by 2025E with significant ramps in ADAS/autonomous driving and improving LIDAR technologies,” the analyst said.

The AV auto market is still in the early stages, but some auto companies have already made tremendous strides in advancing their technologies. Auto companies have only made it to the second of the five levels of vehicles autonomy.

Navigant Research ranks Alphabet, Inc. GOOG GOOGL subsidiary Waymo as the market leader in AV technology, followed by legacy automakers Ford Motor Company F and General Motors Company GM.

How To Play It: Investors have a tremendous opportunity investing in the tech companies behind the Lidar systems themselves, Rakesh said.

Mizuho names the following six automotive advanced driver assistance system manufacturers as “well-positioned” to benefit from the auto autonomy trend:

• Veoneer Inc VNE
• ON Semiconductor Corp ON
• NXP Semiconductors NV NXPI
• Autoliv Inc. ALV
• Texas Instruments Incorporated TXN
• NVIDIA Corporation NVDA

Benzinga’s Take: Level 5 autonomy may take longer than many auto investors anticipate due to safety concerns on the part of regulators.

The auto industry is only a small part of the future of automation, so tech companies exposed to the theme may be lower-risk investments than AV pure-play stocks.

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Photo courtesy of Nvidia.