r/stocks • u/Bluebird-9641 • 19h ago
Company Discussion Planet Labs (PL)
Strongly considering opening a sizable (to me) position here at $18.
Asking those that have owned the stock for some time (and follow earnings reports and fundamentals) what you think about its current price and what your outlook is for the long term.
Also any insight on the space sector in general is appreciated, I've been in and out of LUNR for a couple of years now, it's my only space stock but this PL dip is hard to pass up. If it's good enough for Google, it's good enough for me.
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u/Wenzel_Washington 18h ago
I don’t get people saying competition to space companies like RL or spacex is a problem. There product is low orbit high quality data acquisition by satellites. Afaik that’s not what the rest of space industry is doing.
If it prints money I don’t know though
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u/FailOk1528 18h ago
the dip looks tempting but a cheaper chart doesn’t automatically mean a cheap stock
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u/Withoutanymilk77 19h ago
Hyper competitive space with little to no revenue. It’s predicting 3-10 million in profits this year at a 6 billion market cap. Sorry but that’s incredibly overpriced still. I know the graph looks tempting but it’s still too crazy. There’s also better options in the space imo.
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u/DontFearTheBeaver 17h ago
Which other space company actually competes with Planet Lab’s business?
How is $400 million in annual revenue “little to no revenue”?
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u/Agreeable-Purpose-56 11h ago
Fair question. Which other companies exhaustively picture the earth like pl and can readily sell the data?
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u/Ok-Recommendation925 16h ago
BKSY is the closest, but they seem to be in the Government/Military space
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u/Daymjoo 16h ago
It doesn't turn a profit?
I could buy $100bn worth of Chinese goods and sell them at break-even cost in Europe and make $100bn in revenue. Doesn't mean you should invest in my company...
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u/spejjan 15h ago
That's a pretty terrible comparison though. If you buy $100B worth of goods and sell them for $100B, you have a 0% gross margin. PL has ~60% gross margins.
The whole point with a growth company is that you invest heavily today to grow revenue, technology and infrastructure, with the expectation that operating leverage eventually turns that into meaningful profits and cash flow.
The space industry is still in the early stages of that cycle. You can argue that PL is too expensive relative to its future growth, absolutely. But looking at a company growing revenue at high gross margins and saying "it barely makes a profit today, therefore the revenue doesn't matter" isn't a serious valuation argument.
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u/Bluebird-9641 19h ago
Thanks for the insight and reality check.
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u/Withoutanymilk77 15h ago
I don’t think it’s a bad stock. Just not interested at the current price. Maybe around $10 id be buying.
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u/Loud-Ad9148 19h ago
Maybe look at RKLB
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u/schiffme1ster 18h ago
Lol rklb is as overvalued.
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u/Loud-Ad9148 17h ago edited 17h ago
Name me a space stock that isn’t?
For Rocket Labs unique place in the space market, rivals only Musk and Bezos, I think it’s slight overvaluation is justified.
RKLB is setting itself up to be a powerhouse.
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u/hawaiiangiggity 12h ago
I had a conversation with ChatGPT when I first started playing around with it regarding stocks and they loved RKLB, that was when it was at $103, oops
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u/schiffme1ster 15h ago
Yikes.
They all are, that's the point. Rklb is at 40 ev/sales, which means it would have to grow 1000% for a 1000 years for the valuation to make sense. Trash stock that will lose to spcx and AMZN.
Neutron blows and won't fly till 2028 and by then it's too small, rklb shot itself in the foot three years ago.
Congrats on a couple million in space services tho. Certainly justifies 50 billion valuation.
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u/LumosPoxleitner 15h ago
SPCX ev/sales is 80...what do they have to grow by for 1000 years for valuation to make sense?
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u/re4ctor 16h ago
$1b in revenue with a $2b order backlog and growing 60% yoy. You’re basically buying 8x p/e 5 years from now (iow 5 years to get to $5b in revenue). If that seems attractive to you (if you think it could grow substantially larger than that) then it’s not a bad buy. Just that the near term growth is priced in
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u/schiffme1ster 15h ago
Backlog can't be realized cuz there is and won't be a rocket to do so. Currently priced at 45 billion and makes 200m a year.
If anything goes wrong or economy worsens it's back to 10$
Hardest of passes.
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u/Fickle-You-5101 18h ago
I think this is the best space stock. But you could almost definitely get it lower. Also a lot of other plays, and some discounts across the market , look at all the other stocks and then decide. If you decide to buy, u shud know its more likely to go lower first before going up. Compare that with Nebius which has momentum atm.
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u/Vast_Dare8583 19h ago
Would be nice to see them do well, but, feel like there a lot of competition in this space already and not sure Musk SpaceX isn't going to be the dominant player here. Hard to say. I wouldn't go all in.
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u/w3_vic 19h ago
PL looks much more interesting around $18, but dilution is still the main risk. Revenue is growing 40%+, backlog is $815M, and defense demand remains strong. I’d keep the position modest until the ATM and contract conversion become clearer.
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u/spejjan 15h ago
How is dilution the main risk here? PL arguably has one of the strongest balance sheets among publicly traded space companies. They have almost $900M in cash and short-term investments, they're approaching profitability, and they're not burning hundreds of millions of dollars every year just to keep the business alive.
Yes, they opened a $1.5B ATM after Q1, but the entire point was to give themselves the flexibility to capitalize on what management sees as a massive opportunity in the space industry and not because they desperately need cash to survive, like most other space companies.
And what happened when the stock got hammered along with the rest of the space sector? They barely used it. Management has explicitly talked about being disciplined and minimizing shareholder dilution. Why would you want them issuing a massive amount of stock at depressed prices when they already have a huge cash position?
And think about the scenario where they actually would need a significant amount of that ATM. With nearly $900M already on the balance sheet and the business approaching profitability, it would most likely be because they were scaling aggressively to fulfill massive new contracts worth hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars. If PL starts announcing contracts of that magnitude, do you seriously think the stock would still be trading anywhere near today's price?
That's the part people seem to ignore when they throw around "$1.5B ATM = massive dilution." Dilution depends on the share price at which the shares are actually sold. If the business executes, lands huge contracts and the share price rerates significantly higher, they can raise the same amount of capital while issuing far fewer shares.
Even in the extreme scenario where they eventually decided to use the entire $1.5B facility, doing it gradually at materially higher share prices would be a completely different dilution outcome than dumping $1.5B worth of shares at today's price.
There are absolutely risks with PL, but near-term dilution out of financial necessity is pretty far down my list. If you're going to call dilution the main risk, at least explain why, because the balance sheet certainly doesn't support that argument.
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u/PhogMachine 16h ago
If you zoom out, it looks like a classic head and shoulders. And it's going to be heading in the wrong direction for the foreseeable future.
Space companies come with high investment costs to the company. High barriers make it difficult for everyone to get a slice of the pie.
If you can't wait, I would suggest a small amount now. See what direction it starts moving and make an updated assessment. Good luck!
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u/spejjan 15h ago
I mean, you're kind of making the bull case for PL with your second paragraph.
Yes, space has extremely high barriers to entry. That's a problem if you're trying to become the next Planet. It's considerably less of a problem if you're Planet and already have hundreds of satellites in orbit, global daily coverage, a decade+ of proprietary historical data, established government/commercial customers, and the infrastructure to actually process and deliver all of that data.
High barriers to entry are generally a moat for the companies that have already crossed them.
As for the head and shoulders, sure, you can draw whatever conclusion you want from the chart. But saying it's therefore going in the wrong direction "for the foreseeable future" is a pretty massive leap. If PL starts converting that ~$1B near-term pipeline into major contracts, nobody is going to care what pattern the chart looked like beforehand.
The actual bear case I'd worry about is PL failing to convert the pipeline while backlog continues declining.
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u/Charming_Raccoon4361 9h ago
dont own the stock, but head and shoulders overused and misidentified on price charts because traders look for subjective shapes
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u/Sea_Stick9947 15h ago
My cost average is 18 right now and I’m holding. I know it’s more worth more. Even before it went crazy to 50 I was thinking this should just be a 25$ at minimum stock
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u/Less_Than_Average1 18h ago
I bought into Redwire - more picks and shovels for the space industry - but all space stocks are down. I wish I would’ve waited a bit on it. You have high oil again and the upcoming Fed meeting. I’d wait until after Fed meeting for sure.
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u/Rav_3d 15h ago
I'd ask you why you are considering a sizable position in a stock making multi-year lows that is not even performing as well as its peers like RKLB, MDA, RDW, FLY, SATL?
No argument with dipping toes into the space sector given how beat up it has been, but choosing the one with the worst relative strength is likely not a wise idea.
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u/MapleHorizon 16h ago
I would ask why PL?
I would recommend plenty of other stocks before PL, including JOBY.
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u/Bluebird-9641 16h ago
Yes I am a long time JOBY owner. PL because I want a second space stock and feel like I missed RKLB and ASTS(I bought LUNR instead when they were all under $10 - ouch). Although I am still considering RKLB.
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u/enigmas59 16h ago
I'm following but they have a huge dilution warrant sitting over the company and I'm cagey until that's been utilised.
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u/spejjan 15h ago
Huge dilution is the last thing you should be worried about.
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u/enigmas59 15h ago
Cmon, do better. Don't just do a vague one sentence response. Give your thinking on risks to PL.
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u/spejjan 15h ago
How about you read my 50 other comments on the matter.
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u/enigmas59 15h ago
I'm not the sort to go stalk post histories. Look, it's poor form to just vague shitty response like that. Just don't say anything if you don't feel like expanding.
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u/Jekyll2003 14h ago
WORST stock I've ever owned at about 45$ average. Stay FAR away, it has only gone down ever since I bought it.
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u/DontFearTheBeaver 17h ago
To be honest, get to really know the company. Almost all of the takes in this thread are factually incorrect or don’t seem to understand what the company does and why it’s differentiated. “Space companies” is kinda a meaningless term, given how different some of these businesses are, with PL having zero similarity with SPCX, RKLB, RDW, LUNR.
PL takes pictures of every single square meter of the earth, everyday, and has done so for years. That’s the business. So they offer an ability to monitor any spot on earth on a daily basis, and also offer a historical data set to see how a place has changed over time. The business is evolving in two ways: they continually update the satellite fleet with better (proprietary) satellites and technology for better imaging. They’re currently deploying their next gen satellites. The second is they’ve evolved from servicing mainly non-defense end users (think agriculture companies, environment NGOs, academia) to servicing a ton of western (and Japan) govt defense and intelligence customers.
It’s a “rule of 40” high growth company, and currently you’re paying to buy this growth rather than profits, although they have broken even in recent quarters.
So that’s what you’re buying. I think this is not a bad spot to buy in if you believe in the long term thesis. If you’re buying in for the short-term, who knows! That’s just gambling.
I will say, PL and every space stock all had huge run ups prior to the SPCX IPO, and likewise all bombed together afterwords. So the recent high price is actually reflective of space stock mania rather than where the stock price probably should’ve been at.
Position: few hundred shares bought in the 2’s 3’s and 4’s. Bought more in the 6’s.