2023-06-14 15:23:03 ET
Luminar Technologies, Inc. (LAZR)
Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference
June 14, 2023 12:50 PM ET
Company Participants
Tom Fennimore - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Winnie Dong - Deutsche Bank
Presentation
Winnie Dong
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for the session with Luminar, as part of Deutsche Bank’s Global Auto Conference. My name is Winnie Dong, and I work in the U.S. Auto and Technology Research team here at DB.
Luminar is a LiDAR technology company founded in 2012. It has partnerships with many of the top global OEMs and major series awards with companies like Volvo, Mercedes, Nissan and more. The Company is in the middle of ramping up a dedicated facility in Mexico, and the Asia as well for its large order book. And I’m very pleased to be joined by Luminar’s CFO, Tom Fennimore for a fireside chat and Q&A.
Tom Fennimore
Thank you for having me, Winnie.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Winnie Dong
Thank you so much. So, I guess, let’s start with the industry landscape, before we dive into more operational type of questions. Can you provide us with a state of the industry update with regard to LiDAR and safety standards? Where are we today? And how quickly is the industry moving from, like, a safety perspective?
Tom Fennimore
Sure. And there is two things I really want to highlight that, at least I’ve noticed, one of them over the past few months, and then the other really over the past few weeks. The first, over the past few months, as we have started to really unveil our technology with our OEM partners, specifically with Volvo with EX90, our buddies from Polestar are here today with their Polestar 3, Shanghai Auto in China, and even Mercedes earlier this year. What we’re learning is the LiDAR -- our LiDAR and what it enables in terms of the increased safety, as well as the potential for autonomy is really central to their marketing efforts and positioning them as an industry leader. That allows us to become a strategic partner with them. And it actually allows us to be front and center as they’re really selling these vehicles to the consumers.
Take a look at what Volvo has done with their unveil of EX90 in Sweden late last year. We were in China a few weeks ago, where they were unveiling that to the China market and were really touting the benefits of our LiDAR, particularly the 1550 technology relative to some of the local Chinese leaders. Look at what Mercedes did earlier this year, where the two CEOs who were invited up on stage were Jensen from Nvidia and Austin from Luminar.
And so, it really surprised us how important this new technology and our LiDAR is to the marketing of these vehicles. And so, that’s helped creating a pool and it’s really positioning us as an important strategic partner to our customers.
The second thing is more on the regulatory front, where we’re seeing the early signs of a potential regulatory pool. I don’t know how many of you noticed, but I think it was last week where NHTSA, one of the regulators of safety in the U.S. came out and proposed a rule to mandate AEB or Automatic Emergency Braking, the standard on both passenger vehicles and commercial trucks. At the same time or like within the same 24-hour period, they also launched an investigation on commercial trucks for false positives of AEB. False positive means, the vehicle stops when it thinks that something that really -- something’s not there. And actually, for commercial trucks, which primarily drive down the highway, you can’t have a big 18 wheeler stopped going 60 miles an hour. That creates a lot of real time consequences. And so, what NHTSA is really saying is we need AEB for safety. They included a stat in there that said almost 80% of the pedestrians who are killed, happen at night.
And NHTSA, improving that safety, getting the AEB there is very important to them. But they’re also saying you need to do it with the least amount of false positives, right? It needs to work. You can’t compensate the air system by having it stopped when it gets into it that way. And the only practical way they can really get there is with LiDAR. And so, we think that that’s going to help start to create the early stages of a regulatory pool for us.
So, I would say to answer your question, over the last few months, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how prominent we’ve been in the marketing of our customers’ vehicles. And we’re also starting to see the receptivity from the regulators in terms of realizing what this technology can do, and how it can improve the safety on the vehicles out there.
Winnie Dong
Awesome. Thank you so much. So then, I guess, can you provide some differences between your LiDAR products versus competition? And then also what you’re trying to do in highway autonomy with the future iterations like Iris+ view?
Tom Fennimore
Sure. Look, I know we’ve spoken about in the past how our technology is different. I think, you can listen to every LiDAR company in there. They’re going to tell you LiDAR technology is the best and differentiated et cetera. There’s a lot of things you need to do to be successful in the LiDAR industry. But the two most critical things are: one, you need to have multiple customer wins that have diversity of customers, diversity of geography, and volume certainty in terms of being standardized on the vehicle platform, as opposed to being a trim package where you have some take rate risks.
The second thing you need to do in addition to having those wins, you need to execute. You need to be able to industrialize your product, get to the point where you can make these things and make them in scale and make them with the right specifications and yields and performance, where your customers are confident enough to put these on their vehicles that they’re selling to consumers. So, you need multiple automotive series production wins with diversity and certainty volume, you need to industrialize your product.
I think, Luminar is probably the only company that has done both of those things. Hesai is another 905 company that has probably done both, but their wins have primarily been located in the China market. We have wins within China, Japan, Europe and elsewhere geographically. But you got to do those two things, right? I think we’re now past the point where you need to tell a good technology story and putting up good PowerPoint slides with specs. You got to prove that you can win these things and you got to prove that you can convince multiple OEMs to take this and standardize the technology.
Winnie Dong
Actually, the perfect segue to my next question. You are looking to grow your order book by $1 billion a year, and you’ve announced, expanded partnership with both, Mercedes and Polestar in Q1. Are these part of your targets for that $1 billion growth this year? And can we expect new awards toward that goal? And separately, can you provide any additional color on additional customers you’re talking to?
Tom Fennimore
Sure. Just for clarification, while we announced the new wins with Mercedes and Polestar this year, we actually had those contracts signed last year. So, they were in the order book total as of December 31st, because those contracts were agreed and signed to, even though we publicly announced those. We’re very careful of not front running our customers, it’s very important to be a strategic partner to them, to not announce anything until they’re ready to announce it.
We want to grow our order book this year, at least $1 billion and so that would be in addition to those wins that you mentioned. And that’s going to come from both, existing customers and there’s already been good momentum there of new customers. And there’s a lot of great discussions going on, they’re very highly confident in that, as well as other OEMs, kind of upgrading their LiDAR to 1550 technology. And so, there’s already been order book growth. And we expect there to be even more by the end of the year. And we’ll be ready to talk about that publicly when our customers are ready to talk about it publicly.
Winnie Dong
Okay, great. Something that’s actually more recent. Last week, you announced a partnership with Plus, two events, highly automated driving and safety systems for commercial vehicles. And you will be the exclusive provider for their mid to long-range for their PlusDrive system. Can you expand more on the opportunities that’s presented within this partnership? And then, any sort of initial financial arrangements you can use?
Tom Fennimore
Yes. This Plus partnership, I think is one that I’m personally very excited about. And I think it’s going to be a very lucrative opportunity for both parties. And I also think it’s an example of a company that had a legacy LiDAR supplier that’s kind of upgrading to us for their next generation technology.
We went -- I talked earlier about the commercial trucking side and some of the challenges that that industry is facing there for existing ADAS systems and some of the struggles with false positives. A lot of the companies in the autonomous trucking space have been focused on building an L4 solution. Plus has been a little bit different and more unique in their approach, trying to build an L2 system, which employs more of those safety features, which I think are becoming more important and more relevant to the fleet owners in the near-term.
So, what we are doing with Plus is they have their existing system where Luminar is going to be the exclusive supplier to that system for new factory order trucks. We are also going to be working together to selling that software, and where Luminar brings a customer that buys that, we’re going to split that software revenue, so it helps to grow our software business. And then, it’s also going to be important where we are going to be taking some of the insurance and mapping products that we offered and working together to really sell that comprehensive solution to the fleet owners.
So, what you’re going to do is, if you deploy this system, you are going to get safety improvements and other benefits that come to the vehicle. And one way to help subsidize that cost is to marry it with insurance and HD mapping, and really convince the fleet owners to think more about the cost of the vehicle over the ownership period as opposed to more upfront, like the passenger vehicle consumer. And so, this is a really important strategic partnership where we are really leveraging each others’ skill sets and relationships to bring a pretty good safety solution, and a comprehensive safety solution, hardware, software, insurance mapping to the fleet owners.
Nothing tangible to talk about now on the consumer side, but it’s safe to say that there are multiple customer opportunities that we are pursuing together. And we wouldn’t enter in -- neither party would enter into this partnership unless we were very confident that it’s going to bear lucrative results for each side.
Winnie Dong
Got it. So, then, looking beyond this year, your target to grow revenue by at least a 100% annually over the next five years, which would take you to about, $1.3 billion by 2027 or so. What programs or customers are included in this forecast? And then, maybe for the ratification of the audience, can you talk about the way that you actually include the pay rate assumptions, et cetera?
Tom Fennimore
So, through 2027 going back to some of the projections and guidance that we shared at Luminar Day, that’s almost fully awarded today. When you look at the business we have with Volvo, Polestar, Mercedes and others, those are actually ones where we have contracts awarded today. Now, look, they still need to sell those vehicles and launch those programs on time to get there.
We said we’d hit that 1 million unit run rate somewhere in that ‘26, ‘27 time frame. The reason why we were a little rangy in some of the timing guidance we gave is because we’re working now on over 20 vehicle lines to launch our products over that time frame. If all 20 go according to the existing time lines, we’ll be there ‘26. If things slip, which sometimes they do in the auto industry, it will be ‘27. We’re just -- we can control to make sure this slippage isn’t become a bus, but there’s a lot of other things that need to go right in order for a vehicle to launch at its stated time line.
And so of that 1 million unit run rate, just from the awarded programs we have today, we’re about three quarters of the way there. And the other quarter is from conversations we’re having real time with existing customers. We’ve already shown the ability to grow our business at Volvo, Mercedes and Polestar. And we are in there working with them real time, and we know what their next programs are coming, and we have very good visibility into that.
One foot note here, and you mentioned Nissan at the beginning, let me tell you specifically where we are with Nissan and kind of what’s in our order book and where the pipeline and what isn’t. So, a couple of years ago, Nissan decided that they wanted to develop their next-generation safety system, which they call ProPILOT. I encourage you guys to go out and like Google it and look at some of the news. They’ve been releasing videos and description of that, including one a couple of days ago. They decided to develop that system, including LiDAR. And after looking at what’s out there, they decided to use our LiDAR to develop that ProPILOT system around. They said publicly that their plans are to start deploying that ProPILOT system on their vehicle lines around the middle part of this decade. And their plan is to include it on virtually every vehicle they sell by the end of this decade. And Nissan makes about 4 million vehicles a year. That is in the development stage, which means they’re working on that system. They’re developing it. They’re getting the software right. They’re getting all the sensors to work together. They’re making sure that this system is going to be ready to go and does what they wanted to do before they start deploying it on the cars.
They have not come up with a specific vehicle rollout in terms of like which vehicle, when, et cetera. They said that’s probably going to start the middle part of this decade. When they do that and kind of officially award that to us, that is when we include that in our awarded business and included in our order book business. And so, when you go back to the order book we had at the end of 2023, we had zero in there for Nissan. I’m very confident that at some point in the near future here, we’re going to get awarded Nissan business because we’re in there working with them on a development basis. But in the spirit of conservatism, we don’t put it in there until we have an official awarded contract aligned with the specific vehicle platform or launch date agreed upon pricing, et cetera.
Winnie Dong
Maybe to drill down a little bit more, like what is your process of -- I mean, take rates on those programs, like this one? How much do you sort of hair cut from the compensations?
Tom Fennimore
Yes. What I would say for a good chunk of our order book like the Volvo EX90, it’s standard, and so you don’t have to worry about that. And so, what we’ll do is we’ll look at IHS volumes and kind of take those as the volume projections over the life of the platform, multiply it by agreed upon pricing and boom, it’s in there. That’s where you kind of put in your model.
When you have a take rate, the OEM gives us -- this is what we want you to be prepared to produce for the capacity. We then haircut that, right? We will look at IHS, which sometimes does a good job at takes rate, which doesn’t -- but it’s really a function of the vehicle pricing. I’ll give you two real life examples. When you -- there’s some data out there when you look at Tesla, which has the $15,000 FSD program. For the Model X and the Model S, right? That’s their $100,000 price point business. The take rates for the $15,000 FSDs in that 40% to 50% range based upon the data we’ve seen. For the 3 and the Y, which are $50,000, $60,000 programs, it tends to be in the 10% range. And so, those are kind of two ends of the goalpost. But I would say we very rarely put something in the order book with a take rate higher than the 20% to 25% range.
Winnie Dong
So by 2030, you see volume growing to 5 million units plus, which could generate about $5 billion in your sales. What are your assumptions in terms of industry LiDAR penetration and your market share? How much would that -- of that will come from existing customers versus new customers? And is it reasonable to assume that ASP by then is still $1,000?
Tom Fennimore
Okay. So, there’s a few questions in there. So, in terms of -- look, we built that projection bottoms up. And so, we look at the business we won today. We look at the platforms from existing customers that we’re in conversations with. And then we look at potential new customers, probability weight everything. That’s kind of how we got to that 5 million units. I told you what Nissan said publicly with their 4 million units. Volvo has said publicly that their plans are to put up our LiDAR on every vehicle that they make, and Volvo makes 700,000 units. Mercedes has already given us a big chunk of their business. So, if I just get those three customers and do what they said publicly, we’re going to blow past that 5 million units.
Look, I’m not smart enough to know what the industry is going to look like in 2030. We built our things bottoms-up. When Hesai went public, they included an industry forecast prepared by -- I forget which firm, and I think they were projecting in 2030, there would be 46 million vehicles made with the LiDAR on it. Now some of those would actually be multiple LiDARs, so the actual number of LiDARs would actually be more. So, that 5 million units would imply roughly a 10% market share. I would say we would be extremely disappointed if we only had a 10% market share come the end of this decade.
Winnie Dong
Great. I’m going to turn more to operational, more near-term updates now. In Q1, you successfully brought your new dedicated facility in Mexico on line, ahead of schedule, and this was one of the milestones, as you said, for the year, which you’ve already sort of achieved. Can you provide any statement through the year on the pace of the ramp and then the impact on gross margin for the year? How should we think about the path towards full utilization over the coming years?
Tom Fennimore
Yes. So, that facility is initially sized to about 250,000 units. When come on line, which means it’s starting to make units, but we’re making them in very small scale, initially, right? We’re -- we put in place -- the units we’ve been making so far have been at the Celestica shared facility, which is a semi-automated process. We have a brand-new automated facility line that can handle the high-speed production that has been installed. And so, that is turned on. It’s making units, but it’s in low scale. We’re working out the case, right? We want to make sure that that line is working efficiently at the right yield, everything is kind of coming together, with the right performance. And then, you kind of rip it up from there.
The time line that we’re on is to have that up and running and getting the full run rate, call it, 100,000-unit plus by the end of the year. That doesn’t mean we’re actually going to be producing those. It’s going to have the capabilities to produce at that level because that’s what Volvo wants us to do. Volvo a few weeks ago, kind of delayed the launch of their SOP for the EX90 from December till the first half of next year. That hasn’t changed our internal time line. We want to make sure that we’re ready to go. Look, this is the first time we’re doing it, right? We’re pretty confident we’re going to get there, but there’s also the unknowns, unknowns. And we want to have that timing pushing and not take our foot off the gas pedal in terms of trying to be where we need to be by the end of the year.
Winnie Dong
Awesome. So then, can you remind us of the expected capacity with the TPK facility as well? How would this position you to support customers globally?
Tom Fennimore
So, the facility in Mexico, just to clarify, is going to be making our Iris product where Volvo’s going to be our lead customer. The facility with TPK is going to be making Iris+ where Mercedes is our lead customer. That facility is going to be sized to an initial capacity of 600,000 units. We’re already in the early stages of getting that prepared. Unlike in Mexico, where we ran out of room at Celestica’s existing facility, and so needed to build out our new dedicated facility, TPK has access for space. They have a big room that already meets our standards there. And so, the amount of capital and time that needs to go into getting that facility ready, it’s going to be a lot less than what it is in Mexico. I think the CapEx spend associated with that is going to be more next year as opposed to this year. But that is -- much less than what it cost to get Mexico up and running. But that facility is going to be initially sized to 600,000 units with the ability to scale higher from there.
Winnie Dong
So you alluded to Nissan multiple times already. It does represent the first mass market win. Can you provide any additional color on the type of pricing that you’re getting from mass market type contracts versus more premium platform?
Tom Fennimore
Yes. We said publicly now that the price of our LiDAR is in that $1,000 plus or minus range. Higher volume, it’s a little bit lower, lower volume is a little bit higher. And most of our initial programs that we’re launching between now and ‘27, you look at our customers, Volvo, Mercedes, Polestar, they tend to be higher-priced vehicles. Clearly, for the mass market, yes, bringing down the price helps, but what you need to do is focus on the value that our LiDAR creates, right?
So, there’s going to be significant safety improvements. How can you potentially monetize those via insurance savings. That’s one of the potential avenues. It creates by putting the LiDAR on there, the ability to upsell the consumer over time, the highway autonomy, which creates an additional revenue stream for our customers. There’s the brand halo impact of having good tech on there and better safety. And so, look, you’re always going to get beat up by your OEM customers from pricing, no matter what price you are -- but you also want to marry that with the value that you bring to the vehicle, and that value is more or less similar between a luxury vehicle and a mass market vehicle as well.
Winnie Dong
Okay. Seeing that you are looking for positive gross margin by the fourth quarter, can you outline sort of the main drivers to getting there? And then, can you show any progress that you’ve done on BOM reduction so far this year?
Tom Fennimore
Yes. And so, look, I think ramping up the facility and getting the increased revenue and bringing our -- continuing to bring our BOM down are clearly helpful. I’ll give you -- our gross loss in the first quarter was a little bit more than $11 million. I had $11 million of launch-related costs in that quarter alone. And so, as we get to a successful launch and those costs come out, I kind of get there naturally. I’ll give you an example. It’s taken us a little longer than expected to cook our new facility in Mexico up to the local utility line. So we’re kind of powering our plant now with diesel generators. I have 300 consultants and contractors that are helping industrialize our product. That’s not only helping the Celestica launch in Mexico, Fabrinet in Thailand for a transceiver. But we also have a lot of suppliers because a lot of our components are unique that are ramping up for the first time. We’re doing a lot of last minute engineering work to get ready. And those are costs that as you get to a launch are nonrecurring. And so, those are going to come out as well.
As we kind of finalize our design and as we kind of get our yield where it needs to be, they’re scrapping and obsolescence of parts as we continue to advance our technology. So, just by taking those costs out of the system, I can get the gross margin positive. And I can probably take a good chunk out of my current cash burn rate as well.
Winnie Dong
Before I move on to the rest of the questions I have, quickly I want to see if the audience here has any questions. Awesome. Okay. And so, longer term, you are looking to target core business breakeven by 2024, overall company breakeven by 2025 and then ultimately, 35% to 40% operating margin by 2030. Can you walk through these targets in terms of the scale and volume that you will need? What kind of contribution cost trajectory are you baking?
Tom Fennimore
So, I talked about the $1,000 ASP. Once we kind of get the new facility up and running with the Volvo launch, call it, sometime towards the second half of ‘24, ‘25, we expect the cost to produce a unit between the bill of materials, the contractor conversion costs, freight, warranty, all the other stuff to be about $650 per unit.
Once we kind of introduce our next-generation product, which will be probably in the latter half of this decade, we already have the design in place to cut that cost, both -- once you kind of put the BOM and the conversion cost, what it costs to manufacture it, cut it almost in half. And so, you can kind of see how that kind of drives the margin trajectory. At the same time, we’re continuing to invest in our software business, mapping in insurance, we’re very disciplined on that spend. But we’re very optimistic on that business and what it can be in the medium and longer term.
Step one is to get your LiDAR, the hardware on the vehicles. And then step two is to start looking at ways to work with your customers to monetize what that -- the value created in that ecosystem.
Winnie Dong
Awesome. I’m going to ask a question that we -- because we had Mobileye yesterday at the conference as well. This is one of the questions that we asked in terms of impact from Tesla announcing that they could potentially license their FSD to other OEMs. If that were to come to fruition, what kind of impact do you think it has on ADAS suppliers or maybe your self-LiDAR suppliers?
Tom Fennimore
It’s a good question. One is our other OEMs going to be willing to buy their technology from Tesla. I know that there was talk in the past about Tesla potentially selling their battery packs or their powertrain system to other OEMs which never went to fruition.
Look, the -- why I think that’s never going to be possible is -- and I’m sure Mobileye would agree with this, is we don’t think you can get to anything above L2 without a LiDAR, without camera systems. Look at Mobileye. Mobileye knows vision-based systems better than anybody. Their supervision system, which is camera only gets you to L2++, their Chauffeur system, which is L3 or above has a LiDAR on it. If there’s any company that is motivated to make an autonomous system work with camera only, it’s Mobileye, and they admit you need a LiDAR today. And the LiDAR that they selected is ours.
And so, we don’t think you can get to the higher levels of autonomy without a LiDAR. And I think that that’s going to be the fundamental obstacle to Tesla deploying that strategy. And ultimately, I’m not too sure if the other OEMs are going to want to buy it if the system isn’t working the way it should.
What we’re seeing now in our conversation with our OEMs, they’re launching electric vehicles where they need to compete against Tesla. And I think the reality of the situation is it’s very tough for them to compete on the basis of EV technology where Tesla has a good leadership position as well as on economics because Tesla right now in EVs has a scale advantage. Where they can compete is on the quality of their AV technology. And putting a LiDAR on the vehicle where Tesla today is saying they don’t need one is one way you can differentiate yourself with safety as well as autonomy that really works in a safe manner.
Winnie Dong
Great. I’m going to turn to software and services. So, that’s actually a great segue into the segment. So, you are partnering with Zenseact to develop Sentinel, which is a full stack autonomous software for series production. In your current generation, there are some basic software when you’re looking to advance that software capability. Can you give us a sense of what business model that will look like and on top of the hardware that you’d be selling?
Tom Fennimore
Yes. So, our LiDAR on a vehicle is a very expensive piece of jewelry, if you don’t have the right software to deploy it. And quite frankly, you’re not going to get the value of it. And so, we need to be prepared to work with our partners, whether it’s the OEMs in the case like Zenseact or Nvidia, where we’re working with them on Mercedes, or Nissan, where we’re working with them real time, really roll up our sleeves and help them on the software.
A lot of the software talent at the OEMs today are more camera-based. We have great LiDAR software engineers that are really experts at using our point cloud. Some of that software we kind of embed on our software today -- I’m sorry, on our LiDAR today per our OEM specifications. Some of them we work hand-in-hand like we’re doing with Zenseact. The Plus deal is where we kind of have more of a software collaboration and have a revenue sharing model on the software that we deployed to select customers.
Over time, though, we think that there’s going to be a real opportunity on the software side which is why we’re going to continue and invest on it. It’s not only the software, but it’s the mapping and the insurance. And step one is to get your LiDAR on the vehicle. And then step two is to then work with your OEM and other partners to fully deploy it and capture the value that you can.
And so, we’re going to be nimble. We’re investing in it, and we think it’s going to be a good meeting and a longer-term opportunity for us.
Winnie Dong
You talked about insurance. I’m going to sort of like zoom in on that a little bit. Can you explain why as a LiDAR company, you will contemplate going into insurance? Are you really looking to sell insurance? And then, what is the opportunity there? How will you monetize it?
Tom Fennimore
Sure. We want to do it ultimately to put our money where our mouth is. We went down the path to try to partner with some of the legacy insurance companies. And the feedback we got from them was give us eight years of real-life data and then maybe we’ll adjust our pricing. And we want to move at a little bit of a faster pace with that. A lot of our OEM customers are looking to get into the insurance business. Tesla did it successfully. In fact, the person who built out Tesla’s insurance business, we hired to build out our insurance business. And what we want to do is build more of a platform that our OEM partners can use. But ultimately -- and Volvo has said publicly that they expect to reduce severe collisions by at least 20% with our technology. We actually think that’s a conservative estimate. As I mentioned earlier, look at some of the videos and some of the statements that Nissan is [Technical Difficulty]. It’s ultimately going to manifest in insurance savings, right, fewer collisions, fewer insurance costs.
My pitch to the OEMs is if we do nothing together, then this value is still being created, and it’s going to be all these legacy insurance companies who are really doing nothing that are going to capture all the value. So, let’s work on this together to go out there and capture that value. The average insurance cost in 2021, it’s actually gone up now with inflation for a Volvo SUV is about $1,800 a year. You take 20% of that cost out and do it over five years, that’s 2x the cost of our LiDAR. And so, there is real value that’s being created here. And what we want to do is work with our OEMs to capture that. And, at the end of the day it all comes down to who are the people that are best positioned to underwrite those technology improvements. And it’s not the legacy insurance companies. You kind of understand, they want to see the data because they don’t understand it. People understand the technology the best are ourselves and the OEMs who are putting it on their vehicles.
Winnie Dong
Great. So, we are coming down on time. So, I’m going to ask my last question. You did announce the establishment of Luminar Semiconductor as its own brand and operation. Can you talk to us about this product portfolio and how it helps Luminar as a whole? And then what is the strategic rationale behind the platform?
Tom Fennimore
So, we kind of custom design the core components in our LiDAR, particularly the laser, the InGaAs receiver chip and then the silicon ASIC, which kind of processes everything. And so, over the past several years, we were working with small suppliers to custom design this. And then as that technology proven itself out, we acquired them. We acquired them for, I would say, two reasons. And then there was a third surprising benefit.
The first one is these are small suppliers. And as we scale up to meet our automotive customers’ need, they need to scale up with them. So bringing them in-house, we believe reduces execution risk. Number two, because we custom design these components for ourselves, we wanted to bring that in-house and expand our competitive moat. The third reason, and we didn’t really realize this until we brought them all in-house, put Luminar jerseys on all and had them kind of sit around the product development table together is that there’s real technology synergies. As we’re kind of designing our next-generation LiDARs, having the laser, the ASIC and the chip guys sit in the same room and talking about how you get the most performance you can out of the LiDAR and particularly the components. Having them all work together, understand each other, better work toward the common goal, we’re seeing a technology benefits that is going to manifest itself in our next-generation technology.
And so, we’ve got all under the house. I would say this is the core components of our transceiver, which Fabrinet makes for us. And there are potential opportunities to grow that business over time outside of the LiDAR space because their technology is that good. Mission one, two and three for them is to produce the parts and help develop the next-generation technology for Luminar. But there is still a good business case for that business on its own, which is why we’re kind of keeping that as a separate group to kind of allow them to go out and explore what those avenues for non-LiDAR growth can be.
Winnie Dong
All right. Awesome. With that, I think that concludes our session with Luminar. Tom, thank you so much for being here.
Tom Fennimore
Thank you, Winnie. Good to see you again.
Winnie Dong
Yes. Thanks so much.
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Luminar Technologies, Inc. (LAZR) Presents at Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference (Transcript)