Investing

Is a Pure-Play Quantum Computing Company a Good Long-Term Play?

Paul Ausick

Published: August 9, 2022 1:26 pm

While not exactly new, quantum computing companies are new enough to be both mysterious and exciting to an average investor. Mysterious because most of us will never understand exactly how they work, and exciting because they promise to become a massive market over the next decade or two or three. Boston Consulting Group, for example, has noted that the market for quantum computing could be as much worth as $5 billion in the near term and $450 billion to $850 billion by 2040.

The potential size of the market has attracted some big players. Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Honeywell and Nvidia all have market caps of more than $100 billion and a relatively long history of R&D in quantum computing. Applications of the technology include compute-intensive areas like new drug discovery, material science, finance and climatology.

The competitive landscape is also populated by five publicly traded companies. The newest is D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS), which completed a SPAC merger Monday between blank check company DPCM Capital and quantum computing firm D-Wave Systems. The first pure-play quantum computing firm to come public was IonQ Inc. (NYSE: IONQ), which also came public in a SPAC merger in October of last year.

Since then, there are Arquit Quantum Inc. (NASDAQ: ARQQ), Quantum Computing Inc. (NASDAQ: QUBT) and Rigetti Computing Inc. (NYSE: RGTI). There is even a quantum-themed ETF, Defiance Quantum ETF (NYSEAMERICAN: QTUM). Honeywell spun off its quantum solutions division, which then merged with Cambridge Quantum to form Quantinuum in late November last year. Honeywell retains a majority stake in Quantinuum.

Here is a look at each of the five pure-play quantum computing companies. Keep in mind that these are highly speculative investments that may take years to prove profitable. Also remember that they are taking on some very deep-pocketed rivals.

D-Wave raised $340 million at a market value of around $1.6 billion when it closed its merger with DPCM and began trading on Monday. The stock closed at $10.00 after the first day of trading, up about 11.4%. The stock traded down 6.2% shortly before noon on Tuesday.

The company’s quantum annealing processors rely on a fundamental rule of physics that everything tends to seek a minimum energy state. D-Wave’s qubit processing unit uses that rule to optimize finding the low-energy states of a problem and to sample the low-energy states to solve machine learning problems.

IonQ raised $636 million at a market value of about $2 billion at its October public launch. The company’s current market cap is around $1.1 billion. Since the SPAC merger that brought the company public, the stock is down about 38%. The stock traded down about 7.8% on Tuesday at $5.66, in a 52-week range of $4.16 to $35.90.

IonQ uses what is known as trapped-ion technology using ytterbium atoms for its qubits. The technology is theoretically capable of creating a system with more than 100 qubits. So far, IonQ claims to have run single-qubit logic gates on a 79-ion chain and complex algorithms on chains of up to 11 ions.

Rigetti Computing closed its SPAC merger with Supernova Partners in March. The company raised about $262 million in cash and was valued at around $1.5 billion at the time of the launch. Since then, the stock has dropped by nearly 58%, and it traded down by about 5.9% on Tuesday, at $4.28 in a post-launch range of $3.25 to $12.75.

The company designs and manufactures its own superconducting quantum qubits and has developed a cloud services platform that enables low latency connectivity between a classical high-performance computer and Rigetti’s own quantum processing units. The company also provides quantum computing services through public cloud services providers like Amazon and Microsoft.

Deutsche Bank analyst Sidney Ho issued a research note on Rigetti Tuesday morning initiating coverage on the stock with a Buy rating and setting a price target of $10 on the shares. In his note, Ho wrote, “[Rigetti] has developed the world’s first multi-chip quantum processor and we believe the company’s intellectual property (IP) in modular chip architecture is a relevant competitive advantage in the race to building the next generations of quantum processors.”

U.K.-based Arquit Quantum came public in a SPAC merger late last August that raised about $400 million cash and valued the company at approximately $1.4 billion. Since then the shares have spiked to a gain of 280% over the past 12 months and currently trade about 46% below the initial launch date price. Shares traded down about 6.5% Tuesday, at $5.37 in a 52-week range of $4.98 to $41.52. At that price, the company’s market cap is around $650 million.

Arquit has developed a so-called quantum encryption technology that “makes the communications links of any networked device secure against current and future forms of hacking – even an attack from a quantum computer.” A Wall Street Journal story in April suggested that the company may have overstated its prospects and pushed the stock below its initial price, where it has remained ever since.

Quantum Computing moved its shares from the over-the-counter market to the Nasdaq in July of last year. Since then the stock has dipped by 44%. The company’s current market cap is around $130.5 million, and its enterprise value is about $119 million. The stock traded down about 0.5% late Tuesday morning to $3.85, in a 52-week range of $1.42 to $8.90.

The company offers a quantum software package called Qatalyst available to customers over Amazon’s AWS Braket cloud quantum computing service. In June, Quantum Computing completed its all-stock acquisition of QPhoton, a maker of photonic systems that operate at room temperature, eliminating the cost and complexity of other quantum technologies.