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Quantinuum Inc. Class A Common Stock QNT

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The bet you're really making is that quantum computing becomes a real business, and that Quantinuum's machines, which trap single atoms with lasers to run the math, are the ones customers pay for first. You're betting the biggest buyer, the U.S. government, keeps writing checks, and that the $2.1 billion in the bank lasts long enough to find out. Right now it is tiny: $8 million of sales last quarter, almost quadruple a year ago, against a $555 million operating loss. You pay almost 1,000 times last year's sales, and the stock has fallen 43% from its high since listing this year.

Key data

Price$49.65
52-week range$46.54 to $86.79
Price / sales, TTM988x
Price / book4.1x

The business

Quantinuum builds quantum computers using trapped ions, individual atoms held in place by electromagnetic fields and manipulated with lasers, a different approach from the superconducting chips Google and IBM favor. Customers do not buy the machine, they rent time on it, mostly through Amazon, Microsoft and Google's clouds, to run experiments in chemistry, materials and cryptography. The company was formed by merging Honeywell's quantum unit with Cambridge Quantum, and Honeywell still controls it. The moat, if one exists yet, is a lead in qubit fidelity, the rate at which the machine computes without error, which trapped ions currently do better than most rivals. The customer today is not a corporation optimizing a supply chain, it is a national lab or a government agency funding research. The U.S. government alone was 32% of last quarter's revenue. That tells you what this is: a science program with a stock price, not a product with a market.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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