Analysts Tap Ambarella as a $60 Stock

The cause of the commotion is surely the negative research report put out last Friday from short-seller Citron Research. The firm put the stock’s 12-month price target at $60 a share and the 18-month target at $40.

This is not Citron’s first rodeo. The company had some harsh words for 3D Systems Corp. (NYSE: DDD) back in January of 2014, and the shares dropped from around $90 to about $66 in a week. After a brief trip back north, 3D Systems’ stock has followed a virtually unbroken path to a low around $20 a share.

Then in March of 2014, when fuel cell maker Plug Power Inc. (NASDAQ: PLUG) traded at a multiyear high of more than $11 a share, Citron called the shares “casino stock” and put a price target of $0.50 on the shares. The stock’s 52-week low is $2.32 and it traded Monday morning at $2.62.

So what does Citron have to back up its case against Ambarella? The analysts were absolutely baffled by the chipmaker’s valuation of nearly $3.7 billion, some 60-times the company’s valuation at the time of Ambarella’s initial public offering (IPO) in October of 2012. That IPO, Citron points out, priced 40% below the expected range, and Ambarella’s total enterprise value at the time was a mere $60 million.

Ambarella’s attraction is not that it is “wildly disruptive” or that it has a “open blue sky competitive landscape.” Ambarella is a fabless developer of chips for high-definition video capture and its big customer is GoPro Inc. (NASDAQ: GPRO).

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What has Ambarella achieved? Here is what Citron said:

Specifically, AMBA has adroitly laddered new chip designs from 720p to 1080p to 4K video formats with increasing frame rates, smaller chip sizes and lower power consumption. This isn’t any great technology breakthrough; it is simply Moore’s law ineffect. AMBA’s market position affords it only a 6 to 9-month lead in the climb up the power curve. … The influx of inexpensive Asian-made, low-cost cameras continues to put huge pressure on suppliers. While AMBA still has pricing power in the 4K platform, the 1080p market has become commoditized at every level.

Citron’s conclusion is simple: “We can’t fault management for competent execution into the action camera channel, but this nice 2x growth is where the story stops.”

Ambarella’s shares traded at $99.24, down almost 17%, just before noon on Monday. The consensus price target on the shares is $103 from 11 analysts.