Mobileye has been under attack from Citron Research for some time, and now the firm has tweeted again about it again. One tweet references a Seeking Alpha post which indicates that Mobileye will lose out to competing technologies in the area of autonomous cars, while the other highlights Ford’s partnership with Google parent company Alphabet in self-driving cars.
Shares of Mobileye are down 1.81% at $40.21 per share as of this writing.
Citron targets Mobileye
As a reminder, Citron Research sent Mobileye shares tumbling last week after tweeting that the sensor maker’s stock is the “short of the year.” Citron head Andrew Left has set a short term price target of $25. He first began targeting the Tesla Motors supplier in September.
Recently it was revealed that George Hotz, the first hacker to jailbreak the iPhone, has been working on self-driving vehicle technology in his garage. Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly offered him a job, although Hotz turned him down. Also Tesla is apparently planning to dump the sensor maker as a supplier and instead switch to its own in-house self-driving sensor technology.
Because the EV manufacturer is such a huge customer of Mobileye, losing its business would be a huge hit. Citron leaped on this bit of news to support its short thesis:
And for those of you who haven’t read Excellent research piece on $MBLY by Suhail https://t.co/DWMY7MqF9R …don’t say your weren’t warned
— Citron Research (@CitronResearch) December 22, 2015
The post on Seeking Alpha that Citron references indicates that semi-autonomous driving technologies could see setbacks as full autonomous roadmaps instead become the focus. Hedge fund firm Suhail Capital Management said LIDAR and high precision maps are likely to cause problems for Mobileye as there are already signs that adoption is ramping while the company loses out.
Ford partners with Google
Today’s news about Ford and Google definitely didn’t help either, as Ford is also an important customer for Mobileye. Of course this is just a rumor for now, but it’s possible that a partnership between the two companies will be announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Citron also grabbed hold of this news in support of its short thesis:
$MBLY customer $F teams with $Goog for autonomous car. https://t.co/Y5DRQMLfET – Analysts silent- DUH. Short term target $25
— Citron Research (@CitronResearch) December 22, 2015
As a reminder, Lone Pine Capital is long on Mobileye in opposition to Citron Research, expecting the sensor manufacturer to ride high on the shift toward autonomous vehicles.
