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C3.AI, ticker symbol AI is exploding right now.
The stock is up 97% this month and 310% year to date.
The stock is clearly benefitting from the AI boom but before we go any further let’s take a look at the fundamentals of the company.
At the current share price, AI has a market cap of 5.3 billion dollars. It’s got just over 800 million in cash and investments and zero debt so the enterprise value is roughly 4.5 billion.
Revenue over the last 12 months is 267 million but the company is not yet profitable. Net income over the last 12 months was negative 269 million, and free cash flow was negative 186 million.
C3’s financial year ends on April 30th and until 2023, it was a company with relatively high growth.
Revenue grew 71% in 2020, 17% in 2021, 38% in 2022 but only 6% in 2023.
This raises two important questions. First, if this is truly an AI stock, then why did revenue only grow 6% last year? Second, if revenue growth is only 6% why is the stock so expensive at 17 times revenue?
One answer might be that C3 growth is only just about to explode. The adoption of AI language models is still fairly recent so maybe the company is on the cusp of a breakout.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case because revenue figures already go up to April this year and the company itself is only forecasting 16% growth for the rest of the year..
Compare that to Nvidia which is a trillion dollar company forecasting over 50% growth next quarter.
So a more likely answer is that C3 stock is benefitting from AI hype and the company isn’t necessarily going to experience the hypergrowth associated with other AI companies.
As noted in the financial times, C3 was originally set up to help companies tackle carbon emissions. It rebranded in 2019 as an AI company and built an AI development platform that allows customers to develop AI applications. So C3 isn’t designing chips and its not developing the next ChatGPT. But it is spending an awful lot of money on sales and marketing. Around 70% of revenue.
If this truly is a game changing AI business it would likely be growing faster without the need to spend so much on sales.
Of course, it’s possible that C3 beats forecasts and its possible that the company can ride the AI hype train and become a much more profitable business as a result.
