Level 4 is dead, long live Seeing Machines

Here’s the latest piece of analysis from Colin Barnden, Lead Analyst at Semicast Research on Seeing Machines, Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) and the auto industry.

“EuroNCAP has moved to 2022*. This is why contracts aren’t being announced, as OEMs and T1s have more time to do evaluations (see Hansen Report). Ironically, the delay takes away the ‘Takata penalty’ hanging over Seeing Machines. Had 2020 stood for camera DMS, pretty much every OEM would have had to go with SmartEye, other Tier 2s or the in-house Japanese Tier 1s. The first half of 2019 is likely to be busy for OEM direct wins, ready for 2022.

Level 4 is dead for mass market vehicles. The trend I see is ‘less autonomy, more DMS’ (L2/3 with DMS). That suggests to me the technically best DMS. The key part of Fovio is the hardware accelerators for real-time vision analysis (and to lower power consumption). ‘Hardware agnostic’ is a trade-off not a free ride. The significance of the 1.3 bn kms RNS in the summer is also now clear. Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning is all about quantity of data. I see Seeing Machines even put live updates of the total on their website. This is smart.

OEMs are acutely aware of regulatory and political threats. Dieselgate was a disaster and emissions in general has been handled poorly. Now the political threat is number of road deaths (hence Vision Zero) and that issue is also being dumped on OEMs’ doormats. Waymo and robo-taxis are an existential threat, OEMs have got to find a way to reduce fatalities fast and win political points. They won’t mess up twice and DMS is the obvious way to proceed. Again that suggests technical excellence over anything. If they are smart, OEMs will ‘front run’ the politics and put DMS into everything as fast as they possibly can. There could be a huge ramp from 2023-2025. Again, a fast ramp up supports longer evaluation times and careful decisions for T1s and T2s.

That’s as far as market analysis can go. What matters now is the actual decisions OEMs make. My role is to make an argument but it is up to everyone to make their own individual decisions about how they think things will play out. No one has a crystal ball.”

*’Europe on the Move’ announced Advanced Distraction Recognition (camera-based DMS) from September 2023. EuroNCAP 5* requirements are looking like they will move to demand camera DMS about a year before.

Chris Menon holds Seeing Machines stock.

Eserve Global: a bargain share powered by Mastercard

I’ve found what I think could be a bargain share, Eserve Global (AIM: ESG). It’s price has fallen approximately 90% over the past couple of years, it’s unloved, currently loss-making and therefore ignored by most private investors. Thus, it has a ‘sucker stock’ rating from Stockopedia.

So far, so bad.

The good news is that FinnCap’s Lorne Daniel, an analyst who actually deserves that title, believes it is worth multiples of its current price. Okay, he is with the house broker but I genuinely value his views. Moreover, he tends to have a conservative bias on valuations, which means when he gets excited about the prospects for a stock I tend to take note.

In his latest note he puts a 20p price target on the stock, which is currently only 5.95p.

The main reason for investing is simply that  the Homesend joint venture, of which Eserve holds 35.69% (to Mastercard’s 64.31%) is set to become a major platform for cross-border transactions by global banks.

Cross-border payments is a  huge market and Lorne believes the HomeSend platform is applicable to around a tenth of it, making it a US$22 trillion market.

If HomeSend captures only a small fraction of that, commission payments to eserve will run into tens of millions of pounds. Logically, Mastercard won’t want to have a minority holder in the JV and will buy Eserve Global out.

This is clearly what Lorne believes, as stated in a note published on 27 September, 2018: “Success and significant earnings are now imminent, and we expect that Mastercard, a $220bn market cap global financial services giant, will be keen to secure the operation in totality.”

How much is Mastercard likely to pay? Well, Lorne Daniel states: “Mastercard shares currently trade on a P/E of 20.7x its forecast 2021 earnings. We expect HomeSend to deliver $45m of earnings in that year; worth $930m to Mastercard at present. It is entirely conceivable that Mastercard would value eServGlobal’s 35.7% stake at over $300m (£230m).”

Eserve also has its Paymobile operations valued at around ÂŁ10m, which are possibly going to be sold before too long.

I’ve therefore taken a small position into what I believe could be a profitable investment over the next  6-12 months.

Of course, it’s not without risks. Mastercard could decide to be miserly about the takeout price, or it could take longer than expected to build up the transaction volumes via banks on the HomeSend platform. Yet, Mastercard appears fully committed to marketing this platform.

Nevertheless, I’d advise anyone thinking of investing to do some research. I can and do make mistakes, especially about the quality of management. Still, the Executive Chairman, John Conoley came across very well in an excellent interview with PI World.

The writer holds stock in Eserve Global.