Yahoo Finance We Think LENSAR (NASDAQ:LNSR) Needs To Drive Business Growth Carefully
We can readily understand why investors are attracted to unprofitable companies. For example, although software-as-a-service business Salesforce.com lost money for years while it grew recurring revenue, if you held shares since 2005, you'd have done very well indeed. Nonetheless, only a fool would ignore the risk that a loss making company burns through its cash too quickly.
So, the natural question for LENSAR (NASDAQ:LNSR) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. In this report, we will consider the company's annual negative free cash flow, henceforth referring to it as the 'cash burn'. The first step is to compare its cash burn with its cash reserves, to give us its 'cash runway'.
View our latest analysis for LENSAR
Does LENSAR Have A Long Cash Runway?
A cash runway is defined as the length of time it would take a company to run out of money if it kept spending at its current rate of cash burn. In September 2020, LENSAR had US$43m in cash, and was debt-free. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through US$19m. That means it had a cash runway of about 2.3 years as of September 2020. That's decent, giving the company a couple years to develop its business. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.
How Well Is LENSAR Growing?
LENSAR boosted investment sharply in the last year, with cash burn ramping by 54%. While that's concerning on it's own, the fact that operating revenue was actually down 13% over the same period makes us positively tremulous. Taken together, we think these growth metrics are a little worrying. In reality, this article only makes a short study of the company's growth data. You can take a look at how LENSAR has developed its business over time by checking this visualization of its revenue and earnings history.
How Easily Can LENSAR Raise Cash?
Even though it seems like LENSAR is developing its business nicely, we still like to consider how easily it could raise more money to accelerate growth. Companies can raise capital through either debt or equity. Commonly, a business will sell new shares in itself to raise cash and drive growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.
LENSAR's cash burn of US$19m is about 25% of its US$77m market capitalisation. That's fairly notable cash burn, so if the company had to sell shares to cover the cost of another year's operations, shareholders would suffer some costly dilution.
How Risky Is LENSAR's Cash Burn Situation?
Even though its increasing cash burn makes us a little nervous, we are compelled to mention that we thought LENSAR's cash runway was relatively promising. We don't think its cash burn is particularly problematic, but after considering the range of factors in this article, we do think shareholders should be monitoring how it changes over time. On another note, LENSAR has 3 warning signs (and 1 which doesn't sit too well with us) we think you should know about.
Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies, and this list of stocks growth stocks (according to analyst forecasts)
This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
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