Key Points
One of the more recent arrivals to our stock market, Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX), better known as SpaceX, has never published a quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company.
That’s going to change soon. While the market doesn’t yet have a firm date for when the figures for its second quarter ending June 30 might be released, it’s reasonable to expect a report in early August. So there’s time to consider if it’s worth spending $1,000 on the company’s stock. I wouldn’t be willing, and here’s why.
Moving in the darkness
One of the primary reasons is that SpaceX remains something of a mystery.
Its name is somewhat misleading, since most of its operations aren’t directly involved in space exploration. It has a thriving satellite business with Starlink, a high-capex artificial intelligence (AI) unit that builds data centers and manages the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform, as well as a space business.
While the company intends for all these operations to complement each other, SpaceX is at present more of a jumble of activities that don’t necessarily synthesize. That, plus the fact that the company’s pre-IPO filings don’t provide much detail about its finances, makes the second quarter hard to estimate.
This is surely why analyst projections are all over the place. There are many pundits already tracking SpaceX stock; 25 of them are included in the data compiled by Yahoo! Finance, for example. But, unusually for analysts, their estimates don’t sit within a relatively narrow range. Their figures for the quarter’s revenue have a range of nearly $3 billion — from $5.3 billion to $8.1 billion.
Those prognosticators seem to agree that the historically loss-making SpaceX will also land in the red in the second quarter. The big question is by how much — the current net loss estimates range from $0.12 to $0.42.
Stuck on the launchpad
Another element keeping me away from SpaceX is that it’s still experiencing setbacks in its headline activity.
Late Thursday afternoon, the company unexpectedly aborted the latest launch of its Starship rocket, after some of its engines apparently failed to start. Uncomfortably, this is the heavy rocket that’s supposed to be the launch vehicle helping power the company to astronomical success and glory.
Mission aborts happen, of course, but there’s an awful lot of capital betting on that not to occur — at least, not often — at SpaceX.
Understandably, the stock fell after the sudden cancellation (SpaceX stock fell 5% in Friday trading). With that decline, $1,000 would buy eight shares of SpaceX.
That’s not a huge commitment in the grand scheme of things, but even given that, I’d hold off on investing in this stock. The second quarter is sure to feature plenty of red ink, and the company still has at least one major operational kink to work out. I feel that money has better potential for liftoff in other stocks.
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Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
