Wall Street analysts often give one-year price targets for stocks as a guide to where they think the stock is heading. While these projections are inherently flawed and in no way guarantee what will happen to a stock, understanding what the general analyst community thinks about a stock can be helpful in shaping your own research, especially in an area like quantum computing where there's a lot of hype.
Kevin Garrigan from Rosenblatt Security recently set a new price target for quantum computing pure play IonQ (IONQ -1.93%). As of Wednesday's market close, IonQ was trading at $41.21 per share. Garrigan's price target is $70, indicating about 70% upside. That's a strong return in a short time frame, but is IonQ stock a buy now?
Image source: Getty Images.
IonQ's trapped ion approach shows potential
IonQ is a leading quantum computing company, which is impressive considering that it doesn't have another business to fund its operations. IonQ relies on raising capital in the public markets and various contracts it has to fund its research, unlike many of the big tech competitors in this space, which have massive cash flows to fund their quantum computing research.
Despite this disadvantage, IonQ has developed impressive quantum computing technology.
IonQ has taken the trapped ion approach to quantum computing, which has benefits and drawbacks. On the plus side, trapped ion architecture has impressive fidelity, and IonQ holds the world record in 1-qubit gate fidelity tests. (A qbit, or quantum bit, is the basic unit of information used in quantum computing to encode data.) It can also be done at room temperature, while other solutions need to be cooled to absolute zero. On the downside, trapped ion quantum computing can have a slightly slower processing speed compared to other solutions.
Time will tell whether this is a winning approach, but some of IonQ's early successes indicate that it could be viable.
But will that be enough to deliver the $70 stock price that Garrigan thinks is possible?
IonQ won't see real business gains for at least a few years
Any stock price prediction for IonQ is speculation. While it has a handful of contracts and its quantum computing devices are available for use on all three major cloud computing services, there's really no commercial market for quantum computing right now. However, most quantum computing companies point toward 2030 being a key year, and IonQ is no exception.
Its CEO projected that IonQ would be profitable and generate sales of nearly $1 billion by 2030. After that, management expects significant market expansion, with an $87 billion market emerging by 2035. To bridge the gap between profitability and its research phase, IonQ has $1.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and outside investments, which should allow it to reach this critical point.
While it's impossible to know if IonQ's technology will propel it to be a winning quantum computing pick over the next few years, investors can feel confident that IonQ has the proper resources and backing to at least get to that point.
Whether that's worth a $70-per-share target is a different question that I can't answer, but with all of the momentum behind quantum computing, I have a hard time seeing this stock slowing down anytime soon. As a result, I think it's worth an investment, as long as the position size is kept relatively small to help manage risk.
