Is MVIS just way too humble? It seems like they have a great opportunity to brag about this product but choose to just stay silent?
Not that they're humble. They're focusing on what they know best. Just recently (this year) they went on a hiring spree to push their product further. One thing they don't really know is marketing. They've been public for almost 3 decades, but they never really worried much about marketing. They stayed in business developing products for the military (one being the heads up display for the Airforce). They're basically taking a crash course on marketing and they're not very good at it. Their primary focus is developing and being able to scale their lidar product in a relative close time frame. So it's not that they're humble (imo), it's the fact that they don't really know the marketing aspect of the business, nor who knows if they even really care. They've been working directly with OEM and Tier 1's developing this lidar product. Who do they need to really market their product to if this product is already being made to spec to the potential customers?
we are a bunch of naive small potatoes idiots on this forum just looking to confirm our own biases if invested in this platform.
I agree. What inexperienced investor in a stock wouldn't want personal validation that they made the right choice? Hell, I've been heavily day trading for a little while now and even though I've bought into this company at the bottom, I still like to see validation every once in a while.
what expertise in lidar do any of us have though? is that product really better, does it even matter? eg. if something works just as well with 10% of the data points, and is cheaper, what good is 100% - except you and i think the image looks cooler? what if the product is superior, but pricing/sales/agreements/etc. are crap? betamax was higher quality image and audio than vhs, yet they hardly one the videotape war. maybe the shorts are perfectly right and the company is overvalued, etc. i'm thinking all of us here are just gambling.
Now to answer on this, is MVIS's product better? Absolutely yes. Their product is the only product that have public specs put out to prove themselves. Hell, they only developed this product by DIRECTLY working with OEM and Tier 1 suppliers. So these specs are what the customers want. Only reason why this product couldn't get validated sooner was because of travel restrictions during Covid and couldn't have in person testing done. Point density is a very valuable tool with lidar. At the furthest claimed distance, MicroVision's lidar can hit 1.8M points per second. The more points that the product can hit, the more accurate the reading. The further out the distance, the less resolution the image is. So to have a higher point density at the furthest distance, gives a better and more accurate reading. Also, MicroVision's lidar is using 905nm lasers whereas the competitors are using (iirc) 1115nm or 1105nm lasers. MicroVision can get a smaller laser to work more accurate than the competitor while they use a bigger laser. This is a big feat in and of itself. Some of the competitors can't even bring their product out to market no earlier than mid next year (again, iirc) to 2024, whereas MicroVision is ready for production in Q4 of this year.
So is their product better, I believe so. But just like everybody else, I'm just a potato. I have read their specs and I try to keep up with the competitors as well. (Competitor units are bigger and more expensive). MicroVision's product is broken down to a set of 4 units to the specs of each customers wants; short range, mid range, long range, and dynamic (all ranges combined). Other competitor units costs several thousand whereas MicroVision's is just about $1k. Only thing is, I don't know if the $1k is no matter the unit range, or if it's for the lowest range, or the best premium unit (dynamic range). I guess I can email the investor relation guy and ask him.
