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In 2024, it will be more volatile.
Just now, Luminar, the head player of lidar, officially announced a 20% layoff of employees, and also announced that it would outsource production, and the company will be fully transformed.
The CEO regretted that it was a very difficult decision, but it had to be done in order to ensure the company's leading position in the market and the long-term goal of maximizing success.
The window is shrinking.
Luminar Transformation
These layoffs and changes in production models are the first steps in Luminar's decision to transform.
The CEO of the company further explained in the announcement that due to the new stage of business in technology, products, industrialization and commercialization, and the challenges faced by the company in the capital market, the company decided to shift its business to a more "asset-light" model.
The first is the outsourcing of production processes. Luminar is outsourcing more of its industrialized processes to existing partners, which companies are included not disclosed, but will share more details in the future.
The company's existing Florida plant will remain operating as normal, but will be used primarily for R&D and testing in the future.
According to Luminar, outsourcing production means greater capacity, lower costs for industrial production, increased profitability and faster time-to-market for next-generation products.
Secondly, the company also needs to reduce costs across the board.
Cost reduction measures include a 20% reduction in the number of regular employees, which will affect about 140 employees, and the layoff notice has already been issued.
At the same time, the company will streamline other costs, flatten some of its organizational structures, and terminate some contractors to achieve financial flexibility.
According to Luminar's plan, these initiatives can save more than US$80 million (about 580 million yuan) per year in the short term, and more than US$400 million (about 2.9 billion yuan) in the next five years in the long term.
Austin Russell, the company's founder and CEO, concluded the announcement by saying that making such decisions as a team leader is not an easy task, but that these initiatives are necessary in order for the company to be in the best position and achieve maximum success over the next decade.
In order to achieve long-term goals and address the capital challenges it is facing, the company has had to transform.
Luminar怎么会裁员转型
Let's start with a brief introduction to Luminar.
Founder Austin is no industry veteran, he was only 17 years old when Luminar was founded in 2012.
But since high school, he studied at the Beckman Laser Institute at Irvine University in California, where he studied under the optics guru Jason Eichenholz (who later became the co-creator and CTO of Luminar), and after graduating from high school, he was admitted to Stanford University to study applied physics.
But like those Silicon Valley geniuses, Austin dropped out of school after three months at Stanford to focus on Luminar and design and build his own lidar components.
The company also remained incognito for 5 years, and it was not until 2017 that it gradually became active in the capital market, and won $36 million in financing (about 260 million yuan) in Series A.
From the beginning, Austin made it clear that the company was going to do lidar, and that it was lidar with higher resolution and longer range, because he believed lidar was a life-saving technology.
In 2018, the company announced that it already had a fully integrated technology stack for lidar, in which the ASIC design had been iterated to the seventh generation.
The representative product Iris was first unveiled in 2019, with a wavelength of 1550nm (mostly 905nm at the time), and meets the automotive-grade standard, with a maximum detection distance of 500m, which can be used to realize autonomous driving in passenger cars, Robotaxi and trucks.
Coupled with the performance improvement in accuracy, stability, security, etc., Iris was hailed as a "disruptor" in lidar when it was unveiled.
Technical capabilities have become the company's biggest signboard, and international giant OEMs and Tier 1 cooperation have come one after another, such as NVIDIA, Mobileye, Qualcomm, Toyota, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, SAIC, etc.
In 2020, Luminar landed on the NASDAQ, with a pre-IPO valuation of US$3.4 billion (about 24.6 billion yuan), and later became the lidar company with the highest market capitalization in the U.S. stock market.
But in recent years, the tide has receded, and more and more players in the formerly lively industry can't hold on.
In 2022, Ouster and Velodyne, two leading lidar companies, announced a merger to survive the winter, and Quanergy, which is also a leading company, directly announced bankruptcy and a full sale of its business, just nine months after Quanergy went public.
Among them, Luminar, whose order volume and mass production progress are not bad, have not exposed any unfavorable news for the time being, and from the current point of view, it is just that it has not been exposed at that time, and the company's financial aspects have already faced a lot of pressure.
Although in terms of total revenue, Luminar's revenue has continued to climb in recent years, and the total revenue in 2023 will reach US$69.779 million (about 510 million yuan), an increase of 71.5% over the previous year.
But in fact, it is also in 2023 that the company's products, or lidar, have become the company's main source of revenue, which means that Luminar, like other players, is more or less troubled by the mass production schedule.
At the same time, the company is still in the midst of continuous losses. The net loss in 2023 will be US$571 million (about 4.13 billion yuan), an increase of 28% from last year.
Not to mention the company's dwindling cash reserves. As of the end of 2023, the company has only US$141 million (about 1.02 billion yuan) in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash on its books, which is completely insufficient to spend.
From these three indicators alone, it can be seen that Luminar's operating conditions are not healthy, not to mention that in addition to revenue and profitability, many indicators such as free cash flow have not met expectations, and even the company's own definition of 2023 is a "year of headwinds".
The former world's No. 1 lidar company has lost more than 80% of its market value.
In addition to the company's own factors, it is also worth noting that lidar is not irreplaceable in the automotive market, especially in the passenger car market.
The high cost is the biggest flaw of lidar. This not only hinders its popularity, but also weakens the advantages of lidar in the price war that has intensified in recent years, not to mention the 4D millimeter-wave radar, which seeks to replace lidar.
In addition, with the development of AI algorithms, the application of large models, and the emergence of new algorithms, the pure vision route, which was questioned about its reliability in the past, has achieved a lot of results in recent years, and has also proved its ability in production vehicles.
For example, Tesla's Occupancy Network, commonly known as OCC, which was first publicly introduced and used by Tesla in 2022, can use visual images to understand and process spatial information through voxelization (Voxel) to replace the effect of real-time restoration of 3D space that LiDAR can provide.
The introduction of OCC allows the algorithm not to judge what the object is, but only to consider whether the object is occupied, so as to avoid the problem of false detection and missed detection of traditional vision algorithms, jump out of the limitations of the training set, and greatly improve the generalization ability of the model.
A combination of internal and external factors made Luminar in dire need of reform.
An interesting detail is that Musk, the number one figure in the lidar opposition, revealed in 2021 that he had reached a cooperation with Luminar to develop and test autonomous driving systems using Luminar's lidar.
At that time, this news was also interpreted as Musk slapped himself in the face, realizing the advantages of lidar and regretting it.
But now, FSD V12, which relies on a completely pure vision solution, has achieved intelligent driving with three domains, and is preparing to iterate to a higher level of autonomous driving.
On the other hand, Luminar struggled with profitability and had to lay off employees for transformation.